there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible
Wha'?! By the age of eight I was walking home from school alone, getting lost in the woods behind the old orchard, and I'd seen Star Wars ANH, in which the main father-figure / advisor to the Hiro Protagonist is chopped in half with a laser (how it looked to me at the time!) Nowadays you'd be arrested for child neglect if you leave your kid alone in the house for more than half-an-hour! Come on, if anything it's the opposite way round.
Alternatively, if you want to help the children / poor / third world nations, how about spending the money on something of direct use in doing so? hmmm?
Firstly, the MER are at the absolute mass limit of what can be landed on Mars with airbags. (And of course you can't change the EDL profile without completely changing the mission architecture and losing the cost benefits of reuse.) They also need a deep thick atmosphere with enough depth to brake down from the cruise speed with the heatshield / aeroshell, and then enough for a parachute to slow the stack to a low enough speed to light the various terminal thrusters (and that insane sideways-kicking boondoggle to counteract the coupled-pendulum effect, amazing stuff - go google on it, it's fascinating but hair-raising. Anyway) -- where was I? -- yeah, so, it turns out there are basically only a couple of places low enough down to have enough atmosphere overhead to brake in, which ALSO have survivable landing surfaces (not too many big rocks, crates, steep relief, no dunes or ripples more than a couple of feet high max) and which ALSO have scientifically interesting features.
Secondly the MER design could definitely be improved upon; a project to build a couple of clones would inevitably creep into a couple of fixes here, and a slightly more efficient PV cell there, perhaps a more rugged RAT, ooh and a dust-clearing mode for the mini-TES optics, and... suddenly you're looking at a new vehicle;
Thirdly, the questions we are asking about Mars now (after two MERs, and MRO, and Mars Express, and Phoenix) are different to those being asked when the original Athena proposal was being put together.
Fourthly, we got lucky with both MERs - very lucky. I would put the chance of both rovers landing successfully enough to drive off the lander as no more than 40% at best.
Fifthly, MER cost (IIRC, I've not checked this) around $800 million... a decade ago. Fast Show fans recognise there has been a thing called "inFLAYYYYYYYYshon!" since then:) So you're not actually going to save a lot over doing a new vehicle from scratch.
Personally I find the idea of developing some sort of basic reusable architecture, putting up a bit of dependable infrastructure (more telco relay capability in orbit - MRO produces an absolute firehose of data, and each subsequent mission increases the bandwidth demands) and then darkening the skies with relatively cheap, small, LIGHT mini-rovers - smaller than MER but bigger than Pathfinder - kind of interesting. Purely academic, of course, as it's not going to happen in my lifetime:(
No thanks, I quite like seeing the results of unmanned space exploration. The business case for doing it is, er, well... oh yeah, there isn't one. If you could scoop up raw diamonds into buckets on the surface of the moon, it still wouldn't be a profit-making proposition.
Sorry, you == epic basic knowledge of the field fail.
Ah yes, the tiresome old spin-off technology argument. Firstly, LHC is about pure research that will tell us things about the fundamental properties of fields and particles in this world. A manned mission to Mars (which seems to be what you're on about, although TFA has nothing to do with that) would give us some interesting data about Martian geology and, uh, that's it with regard to this one. (OK, some experience with humoungous aerospace engineering and building white elephants.) Secondly, if there was a program targeted at, ooh, let's say f'rinstance developing highly efficient and cheap PV cells,(a) it would be directly useful; no need to wait for any spin-off benefits.
(Disclosure, I'll be absolutely gutted if MSL is cancelled - but that's a $2B mission, not $200B which is the order of magnitude of a manned mission. Personally I'm in favour of massive expansion of unmanned (robotic) space exploration. )
Yes, but just because it would be good to be able to escape to another planet doesn't mean the universe owes it to us to make it possible. It may *just about* be practical to fly something like the standard NASA reference mission design (and have them live to tell the tale) but the cost will be really big - $200B or so, assuming nothing major goes wrong - and the chances of human colonisation (as in, permanent settlements) on Mars, the moon, or anywhere else is nil, zilch, nada, zero. It's never going to happen.
And please, spare me all the "But if everyone thought like that we'd still be living in trees". Coming down out of the trees didn't involve travelling at accelerating from 0 to 40000mph and then back to 0 again in an environment which kills humans in seconds if any one of ten zillion systems breaks or fails.
So, you'd like me to THINK I should post me extensive array of opinions on this distribution here? Well you're not so smart after all! ha-ha! You'll never get me, you hear me?! neVERE!! hahahahahhahahhahahaahaaaaaa.....
That is why China, and Russia, and Venezuela, and Iran, and North Korea and all the other countries you invaded and explored are getting together for the day that we going to destroy your pathetic country and take our revenge!
It's because the Star Trek fantasy of space being the new wild west (count the number of uses of the word "frontier" in the comments here!) is far less depressing than the mundane reality, which is that our current global society is utterly unsustainable and that we're all going to have to get used to either cataclysmic climate changes essentially destroying it, or living a much much less energy-intensive lifestyle, with very little long-distance travel, trade in bulk goods, etc. (Personally, I think it's going to be both; the latter will slowly start to kick off just as the latter starts to kill people in the tens of millions, rather than the tens of thousands as is the case today*.)
*What's that, Skippy, you don't read the news and hadn't heard of any such events? Well, Google is your friend, you ignorant marsupial.)
I completely agree with you about the knee-jerk anti-chinese paranoia around here; it's due to the Slashdot-posting population being predominantly Americans, who've noticed over the last decade that the effect of 15% GDP growth averaged over a few decades means that they're not actually able to conquer every other nation on earth, militarily.
This is a great step forward, not only for china, but for all of humankind.
And how, exactly, do you work that one out? They done exactly what Leonov did four decades back. (Hint: You'll notice that Russians haven't moved to the moon, either, although their ballistic missiles are far more advanced and reliable now than they were back then.)
It is nice to see homo sapiens thinking long term about getting off this pale blue dot of ours, and not only thinking about it but taking active steps towards such a goal.
Sure, sure, 'cos the Chinese are going to build (1,200,000,000 / 3 == three hundred million rockets and all go and live on the moon, where the corn grows as high as your head in a couple of weeks, the rains are always soft and refreshing and arrive on time, and the rivers so full of fish you can walk from one bank to the other on salmon.
I swear, the thing that most pisses me off about hte average slashdotter is how quickly they abandon rational, informed discussion of science and engineering topics when it comes to manned spaceflight. "Ooh! ooh! moonships! Captain Kirk! I've got a laser gun, zap! zap! Look out, here come the aliens!" Grow up, for chrisake.
It may well be what is needed to get the money flowing back into NASA and instead of the likes of Blackwater and DoD more generally
Not in America, not until you've paid off a trillion-dollar war debt and the same again in subsidies for those tens of millions of people living in those insanely over-priced cardboard boxes you call "houses" over there.
Space colonization? Don't be absurd. When we've colonised the bottom of the Atlantic and the Gobi Desert, I'll be a little less sceptical. Until then, save it for the convention.
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore
You become terribly bitter and unhappy, but you try really hard not to show it. Then you invent Monty Python.
Slashdot Mirror
there's a societal obsession with getting our kids to "mature" as fast as possible
Wha'?! By the age of eight I was walking home from school alone, getting lost in the woods behind the old orchard, and I'd seen Star Wars ANH, in which the main father-figure / advisor to the Hiro Protagonist is chopped in half with a laser (how it looked to me at the time!) Nowadays you'd be arrested for child neglect if you leave your kid alone in the house for more than half-an-hour! Come on, if anything it's the opposite way round.
I beg to differ...
Yeah, that's him. He also played football for Liverpool and Scotland. What a guy, eh?
Yeah,.. uh,.. you do realise MSL is an unmanned vehicle?
Alternatively, if you want to help the children / poor / third world nations, how about spending the money on something of direct use in doing so? hmmm?
Just to clarify, the rover is not $2 billion over budget, which is the impression I got from the summar
Sorry, my bad (I'm the story submitter.) Here's my source for the $2B figure [Aviation Leak]
Good question. There are several answers.
Personally I find the idea of developing some sort of basic reusable architecture, putting up a bit of dependable infrastructure (more telco relay capability in orbit - MRO produces an absolute firehose of data, and each subsequent mission increases the bandwidth demands) and then darkening the skies with relatively cheap, small, LIGHT mini-rovers - smaller than MER but bigger than Pathfinder - kind of interesting. Purely academic, of course, as it's not going to happen in my lifetime :(
I call it the Disappearing Pencil Trick.
Hmmm, I wonder where they could shove the Orion stack to make it disappear? I can think of a couple of candidates...
Not to mention that Jim Hansen, the famous climatologist who first pointed out to the US Congress that AGW (rapid greenhouse warming of the global climate) had become evident in the instrumental record back in 1988, works for NASA. And ISTR there are one or two satellites that have helped with understanding earth's climate.
No thanks, I quite like seeing the results of unmanned space exploration. The business case for doing it is, er, well... oh yeah, there isn't one. If you could scoop up raw diamonds into buckets on the surface of the moon, it still wouldn't be a profit-making proposition.
Sorry, you == epic basic knowledge of the field fail.
Ah yes, the tiresome old spin-off technology argument. Firstly, LHC is about pure research that will tell us things about the fundamental properties of fields and particles in this world. A manned mission to Mars (which seems to be what you're on about, although TFA has nothing to do with that) would give us some interesting data about Martian geology and, uh, that's it with regard to this one. (OK, some experience with humoungous aerospace engineering and building white elephants.) Secondly, if there was a program targeted at, ooh, let's say f'rinstance developing highly efficient and cheap PV cells,(a) it would be directly useful; no need to wait for any spin-off benefits.
(Disclosure, I'll be absolutely gutted if MSL is cancelled - but that's a $2B mission, not $200B which is the order of magnitude of a manned mission. Personally I'm in favour of massive expansion of unmanned (robotic) space exploration. )
Yes, but just because it would be good to be able to escape to another planet doesn't mean the universe owes it to us to make it possible. It may *just about* be practical to fly something like the standard NASA reference mission design (and have them live to tell the tale) but the cost will be really big - $200B or so, assuming nothing major goes wrong - and the chances of human colonisation (as in, permanent settlements) on Mars, the moon, or anywhere else is nil, zilch, nada, zero. It's never going to happen.
And please, spare me all the "But if everyone thought like that we'd still be living in trees". Coming down out of the trees didn't involve travelling at accelerating from 0 to 40000mph and then back to 0 again in an environment which kills humans in seconds if any one of ten zillion systems breaks or fails.
Close, but no cigar. FORTY-TWO DAYS.. No, you couldn't make it up, could you.
So, you'd like me to THINK I should post me extensive array of opinions on this distribution here? Well you're not so smart after all! ha-ha! You'll never get me, you hear me?! neVERE!! hahahahahhahahhahahaahaaaaaa.....
That's the first I've heard of it. Could someone explain what's this is all about, please?
They're waiting for him to authenticate them.
Oh god, another slow news day. *yawn* http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/page/9
America faked an economic boom, too.
That is why China, and Russia, and Venezuela, and Iran, and North Korea and all the other countries you invaded and explored are getting together for the day that we going to destroy your pathetic country and take our revenge!
Boy, that's SOME COALITION you got there.
It's because the Star Trek fantasy of space being the new wild west (count the number of uses of the word "frontier" in the comments here!) is far less depressing than the mundane reality, which is that our current global society is utterly unsustainable and that we're all going to have to get used to either cataclysmic climate changes essentially destroying it, or living a much much less energy-intensive lifestyle, with very little long-distance travel, trade in bulk goods, etc. (Personally, I think it's going to be both; the latter will slowly start to kick off just as the latter starts to kill people in the tens of millions, rather than the tens of thousands as is the case today*.)
*What's that, Skippy, you don't read the news and hadn't heard of any such events? Well, Google is your friend, you ignorant marsupial.)
This is a great step forward, not only for china, but for all of humankind.
And how, exactly, do you work that one out? They done exactly what Leonov did four decades back. (Hint: You'll notice that Russians haven't moved to the moon, either, although their ballistic missiles are far more advanced and reliable now than they were back then.)
It is nice to see homo sapiens thinking long term about getting off this pale blue dot of ours, and not only thinking about it but taking active steps towards such a goal.
Sure, sure, 'cos the Chinese are going to build (1,200,000,000 / 3 == three hundred million rockets and all go and live on the moon, where the corn grows as high as your head in a couple of weeks, the rains are always soft and refreshing and arrive on time, and the rivers so full of fish you can walk from one bank to the other on salmon.
I swear, the thing that most pisses me off about hte average slashdotter is how quickly they abandon rational, informed discussion of science and engineering topics when it comes to manned spaceflight. "Ooh! ooh! moonships! Captain Kirk! I've got a laser gun, zap! zap! Look out, here come the aliens!" Grow up, for chrisake.
It may well be what is needed to get the money flowing back into NASA and instead of the likes of Blackwater and DoD more generally
Not in America, not until you've paid off a trillion-dollar war debt and the same again in subsidies for those tens of millions of people living in those insanely over-priced cardboard boxes you call "houses" over there.
Space colonization? Don't be absurd. When we've colonised the bottom of the Atlantic and the Gobi Desert, I'll be a little less sceptical. Until then, save it for the convention.
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore
You become terribly bitter and unhappy, but you try really hard not to show it. Then you invent Monty Python.