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NASA Proposes Manned Asteroid Mission
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Nov 16, 2006 10:44 AM
from the summon-bruce-willis dept.
from the summon-bruce-willis dept.
eldavojohn writes "NASA has proposed a manned asteroid mission to a near earth object. They mention this being viewed as a "gap-filler" to keep the public's attention between a lunar exploration & manned mars mission. The article also cites these goals as in line with the Constellation Program. From the article, 'Furthermore, a human venture to a space rock may well accelerate precursor robotic surveys of asteroids, Schweickart observed. "Early unmanned visits to asteroids ... it's the same pattern as we did with the Moon and we're doing right now with Mars. It's all pretty logical," he told SPACE.com.'"
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"'The fall of the Allende meteorite in 1969 initiated a revolution in the study of the early Solar System,' said Tim McCoy, curator of the national meteorite collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. 'I find it amazing that it took us nearly 40 years to collect spectra of these [CAI-rich] objects and that those spectra would now initiate another revolution, pointing us to the asteroids that record this earliest stage in the history of our Solar System.'"
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This is important (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So get rid of Bruce Willis by sending him to deal with
s/stick/nuke/g (Score:2)
If you can land on it, then you can probably drop a nuke there. That's the scientific part. However, actually putting a person there also satisfies the equally important goal of continuing NASA's public relations campaign and spurring public interest in space exploration.
So does this mean... (Score:5, Funny)
Best make sure there's solid ground (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best make sure there's solid ground (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best make sure there's solid ground (Score:5, Insightful)
You must've missed the whole Mercury - Gemini - Apollo era of NASA. Science aspects aside, it was just a cockfight with Russia.
Parent
Nobody wants to see robots in space. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not doing PR will guarantee that the entire Space Program ends up being nothing but a bunch of expensive lawn ornaments and a theme park in Florida.
It's only because of the public interest in space, and their willingless to spend a shitload of money on it, that there is the opportunity to conduct scientific research up there at all. Private industry isn't going to pay for it; at least not on anything like the scale that we've come to enjoy today.
The primary goal of the space program should be to ensure its own future existence, and that means keeping the public interested. If that means going and sending some guy up to stand on an asteroid for a photo op next to a flag, so be it. It's that sort of thing which will keep the money flowing.
Parent
Paris Hilton in space (Score:3, Funny)
But in that case, why not just cut to the chase? If the
"Actual scientists" are outvoted. (Score:4, Insightful)
The irrational feelings of the masses affect science all the time. Look at stem-cell research; that's a whole field that's basically turned into a proxy battleground for anti-abortion groups. I think a lot of researchers there tried to just stay out of the mud-slinging, but in doing so they basically got run over: it wasn't until after the religious groups got their laws passed that any of the research organizations started doing their own PR. If they had been doing good PR work from the beginning, it might have never become a national issue.
Science doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not something that can just happen on some high academic plane, removed from the ugly realities of the political process. If you want money, you need to make average people -- people, in many cases, with a high school education and a crappy one at that -- understand or at least feel connected to what you're doing. And you need to do it constantly: not just when you've got a problem and need public support. You need to bring the public along from Day 1. I hope that these asteroid missions are NASA finally waking up and realizing that you can't ignore the public on one hand, and expect them to pay for your research on the other. It doesn't work that way.
Parent
Re:"Actual scientists" are outvoted. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
won't sink (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Better than Armageddon? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe if they get Steve Buscemi [yahoo.com] to pilot the mission they have a chance.
move that sucker into orbit (Score:2, Funny)
Can we put some small ion engines on the asteroid? Because if we do that and can feed the engines with asteroid dust, we can move it into Earth orbit within my lifetime. And that would just be too cool.
Plus, free non-nuclear WMDs (Score:2)
Perhaps one of the Lagrange points would make people feel more comfortable.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It would take more than a "little shove" - unless you don't mind smiting your enemies a couple of hundred years hence.
Not an asteroid! (Score:4, Insightful)
No, what you want to do is capture a comet. Thousands, if not millions of tonnes of water, which can be cracked for oxygen. Also, plenty of other ices which can be used as propellant. Launch a giant plastic bag into an intercept orbit, seal the comet inside. As the sun heats the bag/comet, vent the gas to put the comet into a more usable orbit, and voila, a mountain sized chunk of water to live off of.
Parent
Re:Not an asteroid! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's only a few consumables that you'd be short of in an asteroid: hydrogen and carbon, in particular. Oxygen is abundant in most lunar and asteroid regolith. Furthermore, there's a slight difference of scale between a billion-ton asteroid and a "few TransHab modules strapped together". At current rates, launching a billion tons into LEO would cost about $10 quadrillion. While this may be a "one-time cost", it's a wee bit of steep one.
However, you're certainly right that capturing a comet would be extremely useful. And I love the plastic bag method of propulsion! Has anyone studied this for practicality?
Parent
Holes in the theory (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus, when was the last time somebody wrapped something that big? It would probably take hundreds of thousands of pounds of plastic, plus some s
Re:Been there, done that (Score:4, Insightful)
The Moon is too far away and has too deep a gravity well to be really useful as a source of raw materials. An asteroid that we could break up and use to build really big spacecraft, satellites and space stations could kick start the commercial space business into high gear.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Power is cheap - that's what solar arrays are for. And while asteroid dust isn't an ideal propellant, it still would have a higher specific impulse (Isp) than an aluminum/oxygen or iron/oxygen chemical rocket (probably higher than a hydrogen/oxygen chemical rocket, in fact). Aluminum and iron are abundant in many asteroids, but hydrogen is not, so you'd have to go with the less efficient reactions.
You'd need chemical rockets to get off of the Moon or Mars, because the gravity there is too high for ions. B
Re:move that sucker into orbit (Score:4, Informative)
A decent ion engine, such as the one which powered Deep Space 1, required most of the spacecraft's 2.4 kW of power, and that was to get a 500kg craft around.
Ion drive thrust increases with power input. So, in order to move an asteroid about within our lifetimes you're probably going to need several football fields of panels, not to mention either a large number of actual engines, or a new breed of them. (And try getting all that to the asteroid in the first place).
The whole benefit of ion engines is that you require less fuel on your spacecraft due to higher isp. If you can figure out how to use materials on the asteroid for chemical rockets, do it.. if you don't, you're still going to be pushing that mass with an ion engine anyway.
Parent
Hi. Can I go please? (Score:2)
I wonder that if NASA is thinking about the public's attention, why not send rock-stars, or famous people to some asteroid? Make them do the television circuit to tell us all about it. I don't care about the risk of death due to failures.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
A Gap Filler? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A Gap Filler? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The masses" would be the people that pay for what NASA does. I mean, I know I pay a lot of taxes. And the whole purpose of missions like this is to find activities that do benefit their program (more experience in different circumstances) while also stimulating an interest, in the taxpayers, to continuing to fund this stuff. Making sure that some of the testing and learning also happens to be interesting to watch is simply smart. We're a long way from stomping around Mars and looking under rocks, but we can do some very good CEV testing and some other very cool science near one of those interesting big rocks. And it will look great in HD.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Science is not circus. What NASA needs to do is set scientific goals, achieve those goals and then the taxpayers profit from the knowledge obtained. There are more interesting things going on in a small part of cosmology, with huge implications, than a "hey look! We can do this, how cool!" attention grab from NASA ever could achieve. Interesting, important != understandable to the average person.
The average guy is not going to hear or care about 21 cent
Re: (Score:2)
I maintain that these thing are not mutually exclusive. Doing science with a bit of flair is scarcely more expensive than doing it without. You may not like spending money on projects that don't expressly pursue the areas of inquiries that you're passionate about, but I think you're really missing how hard it is to get 400+ congress-creatures to write a check for 21cm radiation res
Science isn't circus, but politics is. (Score:4, Insightful)
Democracy is sort of a bitch that way. If you can't make your case for funding to the masses, they're going to ignore you; once that happens, the politicians will smell money, and move in for the kill.
Politics is circus. And thus, anything that derives its funding from the political process, or has to otherwise interact with it, needs to get with the program.
Unless you have some brilliant ideas on how to make NASA totally self-funding, it's the "PR stunt" missions that are going to effectively pay for all the boring research ones, that Mr. and Mrs. America don't care about.
Parent
so NASA has trouble just getting space shuttles up (Score:2, Insightful)
i mean, set your bar high, but not so high you can't reach it.
Mining? (Score:5, Interesting)
If NASA's plans go forward, they're going to need a space infrastructure. Eventually, that will mean space-based manufacturing. For manufacturing, you need raw materials. Those raw materials are expensive to lift from Earth's gravity well. Ergo, the best solution is to mine them from much smaller gravity wells where the cost of transport is comparitively minimal.
The key issue that an mission to an asteroid would need to resolve is the actual composition and concentration of valuable ores. Scientists currently have a lot of educated guesses, but we won't know for sure until a geologist makes a proper survey.
Re: (Score:2)
I think wrt asteroid missions, the first issue is determining what value of goods we'd need in order to make extraction and transport cost-effective. Refining ores is expensive... refining ores in space more so. Never mind the cost of having staff members on-site, unless the process is fully automated, that cost would get prohibitive.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that energy
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not entirely.
Most refining is reduction of the metal. In space you have no O2 atmosphere to interfere with the redux reaction, so all you add is power. should be a push when all is said and done. Also, in the low G environment I'd think that you could make some pretty awesome alloys that normally would be self-separating due to gravity. Might easily pay for its self back here on earth, getting into the gravity well is cheap.
-nB
several things missing. (Score:2)
I think we should try landing on comets first. (Score:2, Insightful)
Users of The Internet Movie Database [imdb.com] seem to barely agree with me.
Bad idea in lots of ways (Score:4, Insightful)
Science, or entertaining the public to keep the space budget healthy?
What happens when the public start to wonder why exactly we're sending men to the Moon and Mars and asteriods, just to have them come back again? what exactly did we get for it, except the bill? saying "it's for science" or "it's advancing towards men in space" is getting *old*. We don't have an off-planet base, we're not getting one in the next ten or twenty years.
When you consider that reality, statements like "for science" and "men in space" are ring hollow and people basically go "well, I can't see why we're doing this" and then your public support goes away.
And no bad thing if it did. NASA has been an unmitigated disaster for space travel and exploration. It's almost entirely prevented enterprise and investment into the field and substitued expensive, slow, bureaucratic, political-football State-run snails-pace development.
What have we got to show for the last thirty, fourty years of NASA?
We got men on the moon and then...
What?
One exploration satellite every year or two? Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point, exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.
Where's the innovation?
State run companies *DO NOT INNOVATE*.
And by God, if there's a field which needs innovation to get off the ground, it's space travel.
We need solutions to fundamental problems. You don't get that from a committee.
Re:Bad idea in lots of ways (Score:4, Insightful)
I love to read such claims on posted the internet. [isoc.org]. Nice high irony factor.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The point is, Darpa is a state run company, and has been rather innovative.
Re: (Score:2)
The argument given was Tim and the net, which was incorrect, so the statement currently stands unsupported.
Here's another good question; for the same money given to Darpa, would we have got much less/less/same/more/much more innovation from that money if it had been used by non-State entities? e.g. if we had not been taxed to fund Darpa and that money had therefore been available for people to use directly.
I'm not seriously looking for an answer for that question of course,
Re:Bad idea in lots of ways (Score:4, Insightful)
So the ISS then is simply on the soundstage wher they faked the moon landings then?
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
> Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we
> FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point,
> exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.
What do we get for having the ISS?
How does it help us establish an off-planet colony or resource exploitation?
Of course, it may help a little bit - general experience gained, etc - but that's like saying having a French newspaper delivered each day helps with learning French. Well, it does, a BIT,
Re: (Score:2)
You have *not* actually discussed the matter in hand, expressed anything which explains your point of view or thoughts, or provided *any* information for the basis upon which you (presumably?) disagree with my post.
In a word, you are insulting that which you disagree with.
I may be wrong, but I think people who behave in this way are doing so because they're insecure.
When someone doesn't know they're okay, that they're alright, there is a *need* for them to cling, limpet-like,
Reminds me of.... (Score:2)
But, yeah, it was pretty lame, I think.
Excellent book on why we should go to asteroids (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the book was written before Luiz Alvarez proposed that asteroids likely were responsible for mass extinctions. However since that justification for travelling to the asteroids has been discussed endlessly I don't think the omission hurts this book.
If you can find this book (I'm sure it's been out of print for decades) and have the time to read it, please do, It will help restore the feeling of endless possibilities that some of us had about space travel when we were young.
"Islands in Space: The Challenge of the Planetoids" Donald Cox and Dandridge Cole
By the way, if you've read this far, you might want to check out my previous musings on asteroids - http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171538&cid=14
So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether we should blame NASA, Congress or the White House for this current situation is moot. Anything NASA says about future manned missions that involve something other than putting people into low-earh orbit in an aging space shuttle is a pipe dream, isn't particularly noteworthy and I fail to see why it belongs on the front page here.
Finally - a step into space? (Score:5, Insightful)
For 40 years, NASA has been sending astronauts into low Earth orbit and calling it "spaceflight". Dinking around in LEO is not space travel.
OK, there was the Apollo program. That begins to count. But the Apollo astronauts were still, at all times, within the Earth's gravity well (the moon is gravitationally bound to the Earth).
But now ...
"That kind of early demonstration mission might last no more than 60 or 90 days," Durda said, "and take the crew no farther than a few lunar distances away from Earth."
Finally. A human being is going to travel in space. Not very far. But it's a start, after decades of pitiful pretence.