Bush To Announce Manned Trip To Moon, Mars 1595
edmunz writes "Foxnews just placed an article on their website saying that Bush is expected to make an announcement towards the middle of next week, proposing a manned mission to Mars as well as a return to the moon. Bush hopes to spark a renewed public interest in space exploration. No mission would happen any time soon, rather a preparation of over a decade would take place before the first men/women set out to explore Mars."
Is he serious? (Score:3, Interesting)
I fear though that this may be a stunt to gain some more traction in the polls. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.
Damon,
Re:let's get this out of the way first (Score:5, Interesting)
nasa has a plan for a lander on europa [nasa.gov] complete with a sub-ice probe that's been sitting on the backburner for years.
if dubya is going to spend money on the space program that's a worthwhile project!
Mars is out of reach using current technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:$1 trillion? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem lies with the people in power, they all wanna be the first to do something.
Re:Dubya's on the moon (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the unity of a massive, interplanetary project for the country to rally behind. Look at the sense of national and global unity gained from landing on our own moon, and extrapolate it out to another planet.
The moon is just a rock! (not) (Score:2, Interesting)
Mars is a spooky prospect for me, too. I'm not thrilled with the idea of bringing back samples, let alone sending people there. Bringing samples back to a well isolated lab on the Moon (or in some other spot, like a lagrange point) is another matter.
I'd a lot rather have us go from the Moon to the asteroids anyway -- now there's some profit potential! Plus, what we don't find a direct commmercial use for we can always drop down the gravity well on terrorists at really nice velocities. Kinetic energy is our friend.
For the history books (Score:4, Interesting)
Hmm... this sounds awfuly similar to an awful mistake made in the past. Spain reluctantly sends Columbus to America. Before you know it, they've colonized much of central/south America. This leads to a series of wars which has yet to end.
Seriously. If you look back, every war to this date can be traced back to some form of colonization or another.
Even the war in Iraq can be traced back to colonization. As the European empires are beginning to implode on top of each other, WWI breaaks out. Once it's over, the empires are desparate to keep what little land they have left, and hastily write the Versailles Treaty which causes WWII, sets borders in the arab states (creating political instability in Iraq and Iran), and prompts for the creation of Israel.
It seems that now we've learned our lesson, and that the countries of the world are not willing to expand or colonize. They know the consequenses all too well. Sure, war will always happen, but I just can't see the US, china, or India becoming expansionist nations.
Now we bring another planet into the equation. Mars will soon become the next fronteir. Bush wants it to belong to America.
Just as it was Europe's destiny to colonize America, it seems like it will become our destiny to colonize Mars. If the Earth's population continues to explode at the current rate, the survival of our race may depend on an interplanetary colony in the future.
Do you see the dilema we have? If America colonizes Mars, we will create a conflict which may never be ended. If we don't, another country will. Either way, the world will fight over the control of Mars.
It's sad to think that our future seems destined to hold both great discovery and great war.
A new epoch is about to begin.
Re:Mars is out of reach using current technology (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dubya's on the moon (Score:3, Interesting)
For the past several days the president seems to have been announcing initiatives with no expectation or even desire that they pass. This is like the temporary work visa thing that was announced yesterday, which was an attempt for the Hispanic vote and which has little hope in Congress. This space initiative is a crowd pleaser for everybody. But with the budget like it is, an expense this large has no chance in hell of passing. Unless they ditch their precious ISS, and there's virtually no chance of that happening since they have spent so much money on it already.
Re:Dubya's on the moon (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically speaking the US government is bankrupt against its own domestic entitlement payments already on the books ($40 trillion shortfall on existing/booked entitlements for medicare and social security).
So buying a pack of gum right now is not within the US budget.
Please leave it alone (Score:1, Interesting)
Face it, we have one perfect home and it is better suited for us than practically anything we can imagine. Why we would want to polllute it or leave it is the question.
Excellent time to give NASA a goal (Score:5, Interesting)
If the resources spent on those two projects could be diverted to a singular goal, such as sending people to Mars, then we should have the ability to accomplish it.
Oh, and this leads me to another thought. One way trips to mars. One way as in a volunteer(s) that go to Mars, explore, and when resources run out they die. Step back and take a look at our planet. It is covered with several BILLION creatures with the capability to do amazing things. MILLIONS of us die a year under the most trivial and wasteful circumstances. Sending a few of our kind to explore a whole new world (literally) at the cost of their "premature" deaths is an extremely trivial thing in that light - if the rest of us could stomach it as individuals.
Dan East
Re:Skip the moon! Go straight to Mars! (Score:5, Interesting)
At the time that our solar system is greatly developed and colonized, you will find that the Luna (our moon) has become a major transport hub, and that the Earth is a very lush residential garden planet.
Luna's lack of gravity makes it easier to land, refuel, refill, maintain, take off. It is an excellent storage post for mined resources and medium-scale manufacturing.
We will get to Mars, and we will live on Mars, but I can guarantee that there will be a grungy little spaceport dive bar on Luna before the first permanent residence is even attempted on Mars.
Re:Mars is out of reach using current technology (Score:2, Interesting)
If its true, it has the possibility of getting a lot of people very motivated. We could see a return to the just-do-it attitude of the late 50's and 60's that made the Mission to Moon possible.
I just hope it happens in my lifetime. The power of it happening would inspire the world.
Anything is better than what we do now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
Re:Dubya's on the moon (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly agreeing (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets start harvesting resources in orbit. How about dipping into the atmosphere to capture oxygen (and nitrogen if needed) then regenerate the momentum with Solar Energy pumped into a Electromagnetic Tether boosting system. Then all we need to haul up for space probe fuel is light weight hydrogen.
Lets build a super telescopes (optical and radio) on the far side of moon, but do it with robots. I think this could be done on cheap, buy making the primary spherical (like Arecibo or the proposed OWL), so you ferry out hundreds of paper thin identical spherical portions, with tiny adjustable stilts. A robot plants them around a suitable crater, Adjusting the stilts until each section is properly positioned to focus on a central boom. Some portions of the crater may be too irregular to properly position a mirror section or to high or too low for the stills to compensate for. Doesn't matter, you just need to get enough aggregate surface covered, it doesn't have to be uniform. Does require a halo orbit moon probe to stay in contact with earth.
Then there's that water that might exist on the poles of the moon that could be cracked for fuel, or just used for sustenance and radiation shielding.
Autonomous robots could do a lot of work Earth, and space would be a good proving ground and science driver for autonomous robot development.
Lets exhaust the search for life on Mars with probes before we contaminate the biosphere with human exploration.
That's enough rants for one post.
Re:Mars is out of reach using current technology (Score:5, Interesting)
The propulsion is nuclear, but the technology was largely invented between 1958 and 1965. It's a bomp-propelled ship. Of course, most of the project documents are still classified, because they deal with small size/yield nuclear bombs and their effects.
The original plan was for several ship sizes, the largest being a 10,000-ton ship that could carry a 5300 ton payload (yes - that's 10.6 million pounds) from Earth launch to Mars orbit and back to Earth orbit. The transit time would be 258 days each way, with a 454-day stay, for a total trip duration of about 32 months.* And that's a "minimum-energy" plan - the trip could be shorter, or not dependent on the Earth-Mars alignment, if the payload is reduced (ie, more fuel)
There are some engineering issues to work out, but the science is sound.
* from the book Project Orion [amazon.com]
yes, let's get this over with (Score:5, Interesting)
Now let's get down to it:
Let's take these one at a time.Dude, I hate to be the first to tell you this, but humans breathe air. This means that, from a pure economic standpoint, Mars won't be settled until Antarctica is full. Since I think the planet Trantor is more fun to imagine than to actually live on, I think we'd better find a solution to the population problem that takes effect before Antarctica is full.
They're called "robots". You may have heard of them, since one is on Mars right now. NASA designed and launched two of them for $860M, less than the estimated cost of three shuttle flights. We could and should build a lot more of them, at very reasonable cost. They're fun, they're cheap, they work pretty well, and even if they occasionally blow up... nobody dies.
I'll bite. Which ore is this, exactly? Dilithium? Here's a homework assignment: after you realistically estimate the cost of mining an asteroid and shipping it back here, tell us which asteroidal element could be mined profitably. And please don't try and pretend that humanity hasn't invented recycling.
I can't argue with this, I guess. Pass the pork! All I can say, though, is that you can generate gratuitous tech jobs with useful projects (zero-pollution cars?) as well as you can with useless projects.
There are already plenty of inspired youngsters. They become postdocs. For every scientist with funding, there are 10 scientists working as postdocs, or accountants, or cabdrivers. Instead of spending billions of dollars trying to put spam-in-a-can where no spam has gone before, how about if we give that money to actual scientists? So we can cure diseases, or reverse-engineer the brain? Or even... build robots?
Please, do go on. I can already hear the violins, warming up to play the Star Trek theme.
My cynical musings (Score:1, Interesting)
Fact: Bush wants to build a missile defence system
Fact: Missile defence system is very expensive.
Fact: Missile defence system is very controversial (at least internationally)
Fact: You need pretty high-tech rockets to reach the Moon/Mars.
Could it be that this is Bush's way of getting this technology in a more palatable form and maybe even hiding some of the "cost" of the Star Wars system at the same time?
Re:Dubya's on the moon (Score:2, Interesting)
My two points however, were that (a) taking money out of THIS program to fund THAT program is a fallacy, and (b) doesn't work. I am, in fact, a scientist and a humanitarian social democrat, and my heard bleeds for those people who need (and get, I might add) my help to survive. Th problem is that at the extreme, eliminating NASA from the US budget entirely wouldn't appreciably help the poor. As a planet, we're producing enough to feed and clothe everyone. The US as a microcosm, is fully capable of feeding, sheltering, and caring for it entire population; AND at the same time, capable of funding research and science to unprecedented levels. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that either.
Lunar resources will make it practical. Here's how (Score:5, Interesting)
I suggest a more thorough approach, which incidentally gets around the problems associated with a quick and dirty Mars mission.
Establish a lunar manufacturing base, and build what is essentailly a moveable space habitat, say, 400 metres in diameter. Shield it with a fixed shield of several metres of lunar-derrived material. Fill large storage tanks with more lunar material. Establish a known working, self-sufficient, rotating habitat inside the shielding. Build a solar-powered mass driver pointing out the back. Fire lunar material out the back, taking large numbers of colonists and thousands of tonnes of materiel for colonisation to Mars nice and slowly.
It won't run out of food as the habitat is self-sufficient. Psychological stress is minimised because of the habitat's large size. Gravity is sustained, and a full medical team can go out to maintain health. Shielding removes the radiation issue totally. Journey time becomes irrelevant.
What's more, the vessel is completely reusable so rinse and repeat. Refuel from Phobos/Diemos and go back to the Earth/Moon system or head on out as far as the asteroids. Any further and the solar panels will have difficulty powering the mass driver.
There's an old joke related to this:
An old bull and a young bull are at the top of a hill, looking at a herd of young, healthy, and dare I say attractive cows in the fields below.
"Let's run down and do a few," suggests the young bull.
"Let's walk down and do the lot," replied his elder.
There's an immoral moral there.
Vik
Re:2004 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:let's get this out of the way first (Score:5, Interesting)
It may just be a symptom of my generation, but I really think the reason we need a moon base is obvious.
I take it as a given that we need to establish a self-sufficient human presence off of this planet; we are screwing this one up at a amazing rate, and so many things exist that can destroy the race in a relatively short period of time it's ridiculous; from Planet killer asteroids, to mutant Ebola, to a new cold war, to killing all the plankton which produce the majority of our oxygen... etc.
In order to have a self -sufficient human presence in space, raw materials are going to be necessary; it's stupid to boost all the construction materials out of the earth's gravity well, when we can just mine the moon; alternately, I could see towing a asteroid [howstuffworks.com] to a LaGrange point [montana.edu], but that's possibly beyond us currently.
Once we have the moon, we have it all; a electromagnetic catapult [livejournal.com] to put processed raw materials back into orbit or shoot them to the earth would easily pay off the cost of putting a base there. The only problem I can see would be water, if ice turns out to not exist at the poles as some think (I don't); the easy availability of selenium, and abundant Solar power, should make making our own water out of elemental H & O a snap.
And, the best argument; President-for-life Bush will be able to drop gigantic canisters of rock anywhere on the planet he wants to suppress dissidents terrorists! peace in our time!.
Which is why I'm encouraging my kids to either pursue mechanical engineering or aerospace tech; I want them OFF this planet as soon as its possible.
Re:For the history books (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:let's get this out of the way first (Score:3, Interesting)
ofc, there are prob. 10,000 things wrong with my idea (quakes?). but i'm still proud of it
Point against this (Score:2, Interesting)
I read a very interesting editorial by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post the other day (here [washingtonpost.com], registration required). Basically, she says that putting a robot on mars is a good idea because a robot is well suited for this kind of scientific work. Humans on the other hand are supposed to stay on earth - inhospitable climat, muscular deterioration during space flight and extreme radiation make a trip to mars less than pleasent.
Quoting: Mars, as a certain pop star once put it, isn't the kind of place where you'd want to raise your kids. Nor is it the kind of place anybody is ever going to visit, as some of the NASA scientists know perfectly well. Even leaving aside the cold, the lack of atmosphere and the absence of water, there's the deadly radiation. If the average person on Earth absorbs about 350 millirems of radiation every year, an astronaut traveling to Mars would absorb about 130,000 millirems of a particularly virulent form of radiation that would probably destroy every cell in his body. "Space is not 'Star Trek,' " said one NASA scientist, "but the public certainly doesn't understand that."
So....do we really need a man on mars? Not for scientific reasons, that's for sure. And what other reasons are there? Anyone who thinks we can just teraform mars into a habitable planet in the next 300 years when we can't even keep the ISS leak-free is seriously deluded...
I guess the question of "Why does Bush want it" doesn't even deserve an answer because it's so obvious...
Whoop, sign me up! (Score:5, Interesting)
Manned exploration of Mars.
Permanent human presence on the Moon.
This is probably the most exciting news I've ever seen posted here at Slashdot. When do we leave?
Re:Scrapping shuttles (Score:5, Interesting)
"Sources said Bush will direct NASA to scale back or scrap all existing programs that do not support the new effort"
What about the exploration of the (possible) oceans on Europa? The rest of the solar system? The Terrestrial Planet Finder? [nasa.gov]
There's more to space than Mars.
Spirit Rover Picture(s) Hint @ Life on Mars??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Might this soil crust on Mars be same/similar to the biological soil crust found at Arches National Park [nps.gov] (Moab, Utah)?
Additional details regarding biological soil crusts maybe are to found here:
intermediate details [soilcrust.org]
advanced details [soilcrust.org]
Bush is running out of options before election (Score:2, Interesting)
So, mars / moon is in the menu, since catching Laden and fixing the economy is not the first priority ...
Well ... whatever works! Personally I believe it would been better for economy ( not eco friendly ) to say take a "Super Highway" project where hundreds of people will get job thru Cheny's company and we can drive on those highway at 200 miles / hour.
Yes, car design will have to be re-thought and so is the whole thing associated with it, like we will see "super gas", "super oil" etc. etc. and "super highwaay capable" cars ... man that will be a dream.
Look, I know speed kills but I would rather die at driving 200 miles/hr than driving at 40 miles/hour. You die anyway ... just go with a better bang!
I guess I am crazy geek in here with no life posting at slashdot at midnight! Sure there are people in the right places are doing the right thing to make my life better...
or, they just don't give a $@##@!
A more realistic plan ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, back to earth and things that matter: How about a plan to reduce our dependence on non-renewable sources of energy? What I'd like to see is a commitment from our government to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel by
Like the proposed space program, such an effort would produce profound advances in science and technology and create thousands of jobs. In fact, the technological and financial impact of fossil fuel reduction would be far in excess of anything a space program could possibly hope to accomplish.
But, unlike the space program, our efforts would be spent working on several very earthly problems: climate change and dependence on imported fuel.
'Impossible' you say? That's what they said when JFK proposed putting men on the moon within the decade. Technologically it's well within our grasp. All we need is the political will.
We can and should go to space when the time is right. But right now there are pressing matters to deal with here on earth: War, Nukes, Climate Change, War, etc.
Dubya and his posse are crooks. They could give a flying fuck about Mars or the Moon. They just want to get reelected. Ignore them.
I find it somewhat ironic that on the very day scientists announce a likely 15% to 37% reduction on plant and animal species due to climate change that Dubya spews forth something like this.
Re:"Who to send" is a serious question! (Score:5, Interesting)
Howard Dean Said It First (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$20 billion? More like $200 MINIMUM (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to know how much weight his estimate has ponder on this little tidbit. That insane 500+ billion price tag in response to Bush Sr.'s desire for a mars mission is one of the things that got him working on his plan in the first place. Once he had fleshed mars direct out- including a small scale demonstration of his fuel production method- his plan became somewhat co-opted by NASA as their current plan of choice for a mars mission and a lower price estimate for a manned mars mission was revised down from the 500+ price tag to around 60-80 billion as a direct result of adopting some of the ideas he proposed.
That 500+ billion dollar plan figured on the development of new technology and a massive expedition in the vision of Werner Von Braun, new technolgy everywhere. In short it was A bonaza for space contractors that made the commitee proposal acceptable to all parties that took place in its creation.. ie they all got a nice slice of the pie. Hell its entirely possible the 500billion was a woefully lowballed estimate of what that plan would have ultimately cost had we actually persued it.
The Zurbin plan uses known hardware. The fuel creation process is a very well established set of checmical reactions that has been in use since the 1800's and as I mentioned already demonstrated ( in martian atmosphere conditions ) by Zurbin. He proposes a return of a heavy lift booster either by reviving saturn V, using the russian energia design or adapting shuttle hardware to lift payload mass rather than a heatshield/landing gear/control surfaces for the shuttle. IE its not new.
One of two 'new' elements is the length of time. He proposes a 500 day long stay on the surface of mars instead of the roughly two weeks proposed by most other proposals. With roughly 6 months travel time both ways the equipment then has to be sufficiently reliable or backed up by redundancies for a 3-4 year period. The other and probably only truly new element to his plan is to utilize artificial gravity via rotation of the habitat against the counterweight of the final launch stage during the trip to Mars. An element that is optional but desirable to avoid the loss of bone density during prolonged exposure to zero G.
Lastly he has one very contraversial element and that is a small nuclear reactor as part of the mission. By the way, if you think reactors havn't gotten to space you don't know much about Soviet sattelites.
Now before you question this price tag again I ask you do two things. One research the proposal ( Mars Direct ) presented as being atainable for 20billion. It has been reviewed enough by those who know their stuff that it has slowly gained acceptance in the space industry. 2, instead of stating that a program will over run because other programs have state specifically why it will happen in this case. Overuns are not mandatory and they are not magical. They happen for a reason.
As a side note I will simply say Station is a very poor example for you to use as a program that suffered over runs. If all you know about the station program is that it suffered over runs but not WHY you need to look into what happend, and you need to dig deeper than the generally shallow and politically motivated attacks on stations budget overun.
Re:let's get this out of the way first (Score:4, Interesting)
2. The moon gives us an opportunity to work out engineering issues of establishing a permanent base on foreign celestial bodies.
3. There may be immediate tangible benefits to a moon base: mining, factories, observatories, astronaut training, research.
Also, if this mission is successful and the public see that some actual benefits are coming from a permanent base on another world, that could open the eyes of funders for future Mars missions, and look like a bit more natural step than just going straight to Mars.
Re:Scrapping shuttles (Score:4, Interesting)
Before we can go to Mars, however, there are some issues we need to figure out. A Mars mission (round trip) is expected to be somehwere in the neighborhood of 2 years. Thats 2 years without the possibility resupply from Earth, or the ability to quickly return to Earth should a serious problem arise, not to mention you simply can't land on Mars and expect to live off the land.
What I'd like to see is a Moon base be built and have some volunteers provide the proof of concept that a 2 year mission without Earth's help (except for remote control where needed) is doable. Its easy to send up a few barrels of water to the ISS every few months. Its quite another problem when your talking about sending it to Mars. We didn't go land on the moon wit the first Apollo launch. At least one (I can't remember how many) Apollo missions circled but didn't land on the moon prior to Apollo 11, taking the incremental approach to what would turn out to be a very successfull project.
Sure you can send stuff on ahead of the humans (which is what some proposals I've seen suggest), including habitation modules and equipment that can manufacture the needed fuel to return home, before the humans even leave Earth, but none of this has been proven to be practical for a Mars mission yet. We have a hard enough time sending unmanned missions to Mars to help understand what is and isn't on Mars.
Personally, I see a human Mars mission being an international effort. After all, the USA isn't in a space race against any other country humans to Mars first (okay, maybe China is thinking about it, but Russia definatly isn't).
The ISS and Shuttle were great concepts when designed and planned, but frankly, both of them keep us chained to LEO with no place to go. And the ISS isn't even close to living up to what it was supposed to be.
Supplies (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:let's get this out of the way first (Score:4, Interesting)
But, also consider this: are contributions to humanity from people like Hawking worth the detrimental effects of basically stifling natural selection?
Note: I'm not arguing one way or the other. Just some food for thought.
--Jeremy
A litte personal analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
Firstly, one could quite easily see this as an election year joke made by the son of a president who stated similar goals back in 1989, and there is good evidence for that as well: Bush has not been remotely interested in space apart from military projects, and cut funding on a number of science projects. Also, Bush has a track record of trying to accomplish what his father did not.
Secondly, America has done huge projects in the past in order to rally national pride and out do foreign competitors. The whole Apollo programme was announced at the height of the cold war when Russia was breaking space records and third world countries were warming to communism. By the early 70's, after the initial landings had been done, national pride had already been dented by a huge and costly lossful foreign war that had sapped morale and by a revolution of the young not interested in high tech, but in sex 'n drugs 'n rock 'n roll. (That has only changed in that the young are now interested in tech again).
Thirdly, in 1989, although the warsaw pact (eastern europe) was falling apart, the Soviets had by then again achieved a number of space successes by way of a practical manned launch programme with the soyuz vehicles, a long term manned space station with mir (it put spacelab to shame in terms of mission length) and had already launched their own version of the shuttle with the buran, whose launcher , energia, could carry far larger tonnage into space than anything else at the time (or now for that matter - 120 tonnes without the buran). My personal view is that Bush Sr's vision was mainly made to counteract the flagging morale of american space ventures.
Fourthly, now, in 2004, we have just had a number of years , since 9/11, that have been turbulent to say the very least. America is involved in military conflicts with two nations, one of which (Iraq) is an outright mess to say the least, involving the nations' involveds' politicians in distrust from their own and foreign nations. (Don't believ me? Take a snap poll here on
Fifthly, this leads me to believe that the goals stated at the top of this post have been made in earnest, but not for the stated reasons. I would think that there is a large interest in the current administration, to develop improved and newer types of space weaponry, in order to deny the Chinese future superiority in that theater. Thus the idea of directly involving the military in NASA. I also think that the moon goal is one of of national pride on the one hand, to get there before the Chinese and Indians do, and partly because the moon would make an ideal place for
Re:Who to send...how many to send... (Score:3, Interesting)
Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume IIA [goldkeys.com]
Re:$1 trillion? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"Who to send" is a serious question! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Scrapping shuttles (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite. Maybe if George Bush senior hadn't funded Osama bin Laden, or if Donald Rumsfeld hadn't sold Saddam Hussein chemical weapons they wouldn't have become the threats that they did.
Still, you reap what you sow.
On the Mars front, does anyone really believe that this is anything other than blatant electioneering?
A case of 'jam tomorrow'?
Re:Sorry to tell you this but... (Score:2, Interesting)
The space station was a very exciting & challenging idea when the president (Reagan, for those who don't remember) proposed [klabs.org] a permanent manned station 'within the decade'. 20 years later and counting, and look what we have.
Pathetic Political Ploy (Score:3, Interesting)
Mars Needs People (Score:3, Interesting)
Why wait a decade? Why not poll around for a group of, say, eight or ten people willing to be sent on a one-way trip to Mars? They'd go in, say, two linked ships (linking them facilitates artificial gravity [by spinning them about a common tether, which might remain behind, in [geostationary] orbit, as a sort of radio station/weathersat/etcetera]) which allows some redundancy in case of catastrophic loss of one of the ships and two entry landers (again: redundancy).
Send regular supply drops for them to replenish tools/atmosphere/food/medicine/etcetera from, say on a bimonthly basis, using the parachute/airbag system currently used for the landers/rovers (though since most of the stuff would be inert, there's less to go wrong). "Precharge" their arrival area with several such drops. They'll be a bit scattered, but that's not a huge deal if they have a "Mars Car" (or two) to to get 'em.
Build an underground habitation facility, with airlocks and hydroponics, with two of those "safe, buried" nuclear reactors for power (like they were discussing for that Alaskan town). Better still, make TWO such habitats, again, to protect against catastrophic loss of the whole colony. People could/would switch off between them when they started to get cabin fever with their mates. Keep 'em busy, and it won't degenerate as fast as in isolation on Earth
Their objective would be twofold: build a permanent, ever-growing, and self-sustaining human presence on Mars and perform the scientific studies and explorations of our sister planet that we simply can't do with autonomous rovers.
I'm sure there'd be more than eight volunteers, even if it *is* probably a one-way ticket. Hell, a third objective (which would appeal to the corps, should they get involved) would be to build the facilites to construct, fuel, and launch Mars-to-Earth vessels. This wouldn't be as hard as it sounds if the really tricky stuff (small parts, electronics, etc.) could be delivered from Earth. Then you can return samples (fairly easily), people (not bloody likely: too much invested in getting them there), and even precious minerals from mining projects (later on, perhaps by running a mag-lin-accelerator up the side of Olympus Mons?).
And so on.
But without a "be able to get them back to Earth" mechanism, the US would never go for it. Depsite the fact that that's precisely how their country was pioneered/settled. And which is also why China is more than likely to be the ones to establish such a colony, first.
Bush (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sorry to tell you this but... (Score:1, Interesting)
When you enter new loans, you can either loan inside your own economy, or you can loan from foreign governments. If you loan from your own economy, you get an effect known as crowding-out, where money that was going to be invested is redirected into government loans (because government loans tend to have good, guaranteed, payback). The more money the government loans, the less money is available to reinvest in the economy itself (put simply: less stuff gets made and built). This reduces economic growth, and is generally bad for everyone involved.
If you enter new loans with foreign governments, that is money that leaves the economy, and does not come back. This results (over time) in excessive inflation, which reduces the value of money and lower the average standard of living (because people can't afford to buy as much).
One of the biggest risks with deficits, is that you can reach a point where you need to pay so much interest, that you can only cover it by entering into new loans, which is a deficit spiral. This is incredibly hard to break free from, and is very dangerous for the economy. The bush administration has put the US on the road to this situation, and it is going to take a lot of work from the next administration to undo the damage.
This is why the tax break was a notoriously bad idea. Yes, a tax break will create economic incentive, but only if it is not covered by borrowed money. You can not boost the economy with money derived from government loans. Reagan tried this, and failed. How easily people forget.
The ironic thing (and a tribute to the power of the US economy) is that despite all these economy-destroying activities, the economy is reviving. But make no mistake, government deficits are bad, and in the long term they can and will harm the economy.
I am all for space exploration... (Score:3, Interesting)
I say this to say: NASA does not do a good job marketing itself. I bet a lot of "average" Americans say/think the same thing. I REALLY wish NASA would get a professional marketing team from Madison Avenue to get Americans more excited about space. Big Question: What do we have to gain from it? And I'm talking about monetary gain. Where will we be paid back from out investment in so many tax dollars? Like I said, I'm all for it, but I think NASA (and the government) need to do a better job of selling it.
Re:How much will it cost? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:There will be false negatives, inherently (Score:3, Interesting)
Humanity, as our explosive population growth demonstrates, has reached an unprecedented point of suitability for Earth survival.
At any rate, evolution depends on mutation. Having the luxury to allow those you call "negatives" to survive increases our mutation rate and diversifies our genetic line. More diversification, means we'll have a better reaction should a major change take place in our environment. If we were all genetically fit in the same way then we would all be susceptible to the same attack. Read about the current strain of wheat farmers use for some grim scenarios.
Take plague for example. How do you know that the sickly boy from today does not contain code that will make many immune to the plagues of tomorrow? Read up on sickle cell anemia and its relation to malaria.
I was pretty excited about this, but.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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How the hell will we pay for this? (Score:3, Interesting)
But what awful timing. Here we are with the biggest budget defecit in recent memory and an administration that has no plan to get spending under control. They continue, in fact, to commit us to fantastically expensive foreign adventures. Things aren't likely to get better in the short term.
Meanwhile, million of Americans live without health insurance. The federal government keeps shifting the burden of services back down to the states, who are massively cutting things like education just to stay afloat.
There's a soft economic recovery underway, but it won't last long when interest rates begin to react to federal debt. Then there will be inflation, and even more idle workers will add to our miserable unemployment rate.
Now it's proposed we spend a trillion dollars or so on the down payment for a Mars program. What madness.
This is an election year stunt and grounds for the biggest corporate welfare program since the Cold War. The Spirit photos are exciting, but let's figure out how to go to Mars without bankrupting ourselves or putting more workers on the streets.
Re:Timing is everything (Score:3, Interesting)
So basically you're saying America can't afford to lose The World Dick-Waving Championships. Pardon me if I don't care.
The United States leads the world in many, many industries already. Why MUST space exploration be among them?
A successful manned Mars mission would be a stunning success for mankind
As long as it's not Chinamankind; then we Americans "lose" somehow.
Missiles barely missed bin laden ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:bottlerocketeer (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? You've been there and asked the people directly? Gosh, you must really get around to have interviewed everyone in Iraq so quickly! Or, could it be that you're simply regurgitating news you would like to believe is true without first checking to see whether it is true or not? Could it be that you actually want the people of Iraq to be suffering because it feeds your anger against Bush?
Amnesty International was doing its thing. Being a respectable, diplomatic charity, it uses words and public opinion to change the world.
And over 300,000 innocent civilians are DEAD IN THE GROUND, executed by Saddam and his henchmen, while Amnesty International was "doing its thing", being "respectable" and using "words and public opinion to change the world." This all happened since the U.N. sanctioned war against Iraq in 1991. I wonder what the dead would say about Amnesty's "respectable" way of getting murderous dictators to change their ways. Oh, I forgot, they're dead, and you don't care a damn about them. If Amnesty International had been running things back in 1939, Hitler would be in power, the Jews would be history, and Frenchmen would be speaking German. Well, I guess that last one wouldn't be so bad.
And how Bush Sr. gave Saddam equipment to make WMDs, then gave him intelligence to use it. Hardly innocent.
Actually, you'd have to go back a lot further than Bush Sr. to see who was giving Saddam weapons. Try the Carter administration. As for innocence, perhaps you've heard of the all the Russian, German, and French conventional weapons we've found in country. You know, the ones that have been imported into Iraq after 1991 in violation of the U.N. mandate against Iraq? You're so eager to blame the U.S., but the key appeasers in the U.N. have far more blood on their hands, and far more recent blood at that.
You really need to turn off Fox News and read some books.
And you really need to quit living at DemocraticUnderground.com, Moveon.org, and CNN, since that seems to be your primary source of unfounded vitriol against the President and these United States.
Ronald Reagan was called a warmonger and idiot lunatic by everyone not a staunch Republican.
That's odd. The only people who called him that were hardcore leftwing liberals, not moderates, not right wingers, and not conservatives.
Well, seeing as Jimmy Carter has done more for the world during Bush's term than Bush, I think he'll be remembered in a much, much nicer light.
What's he done? Well, let's see. He badmouthed the current president on foreign policy, something that no former president has ever done, regardless of party affiliation, since the country was founded. He got a Nobel prize from a commitee more concerned with sticking their thumb in the eye of the U.S. than anything else. He's pontificated at length on how he doesn't think the U.S. has done the right thing, but he's completely dodged any possible question of what he would've done differently except to say that he would've handed it all off to the U.N -- which is a fancy political dodgy way of saying "I wouldn't have done anything."
I'm sure all of this is falling on deaf ears, because you're clearly too angry and naive to be even remotely rational. Please, try to think about what I've said, though. You're not doing anyone any favors by allowing your emotions to rule you in this manner.
NASA Centers at largest electoral states (Score:2, Interesting)
The only thing he hasn't done to capitalize on this is to declare the creation of the Ronald Reagan Space Flight Center in New York, the one remaining mega-electoral state without a Center.
Re:"Who to send" is a serious question! (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you really think that, if sending automated machinery into the asteroid belt will improve some corporate bottom line, they will choose to do it in a more expensive way that better supports colonization instead? Do you think the present economy will mine for resources to build a generation ship or L-5 habitat, or will they be more likely to use whatever resources they obtain on earth, at least for the forseeable future?
Which is it, do we need to mine to support colonization or do we need to have colonies as an excuse to mine? If colonizing space is a good thing (which I actually think it is), then mining might be a method towards that end. But people who don't agree that colonizing space is a good thing are not going to change their minds if we claim that colonizing space will let us mine it, and we can use what we mine to colonize space. Either colonizing space can be an end in iteslf, or mining can be, but they can't both be each other's ends.