Japan's 20-Year Plan for Space 263
rwven writes "Japan has just released information on their new space plan which will take them through the year 2025. Included in their plan are robots and nanotechnology for moon surveys as well as an eventual hydrogen powered mach-5 capable plane, a mach-2 capable passenger airliner and a manned mission to the moon. They will consider missions to mars and other planets after 2025. Space.com is also carrying this story."
Nanotech? (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought Nanotech was still in its infancy. What are they going to do, dump a bunch of buckyballs in a crater?
20 years!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why Repeat Our Mistakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should Asian space efforts go for "manned" space flights?
I love Star Trek as much as anybody but the human body is a very difficult payload to sustain. If Japan is going to do serious planetary exploration (...and I wish them well at this...) then the first step should be to define goals and discard things with a low payoff
Apart from publicity stunts and tourism (... which should be self-funding ...), what goals are served by putting humans on the moon or in cislunar space?
Robots can explore far more cheaply than humans, so for any particular amount of money, we can do more exploration with robots than with humans.
The idea that humans can make on-site decisions better than robots can is simply an artifact of time-scale. That is, while there is some necessary time-lag between a robot noticing a funny rock on Mars or Titan, reporting back to Mission Control on Earth, and then acting on directions ... so what? The robot is patient, doesn't sleep, and if properly powered doesn't have to worry about food supplies.
Like I said, I love Star Trek but until we get really, really serious advances in technology, lunar and cislunar exploration is more sensibly done with robots.
But I'd be interested in contrary views.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why Repeat Our Mistakes? (Score:2, Insightful)
Other viewpoints include the utility of human decision making vs. silicon decision making. Today, and for the foreseeable future, it is superior.
Re:Nanotech? (Score:2, Insightful)
Nanotech may indeed be in its infancy, but isn't that a good reason to plan ahead?
IIRC, Apollo was planned in the punched-card era. Compared to the beloved IBM 1138, my cellphone is practially nanotech.
Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
People are allowed to be people, you know. Naturally curious and sometimes doing dangerous and expensive things that have no obvious economic interest.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh. Heh. The problem with flying cars isn't so much the technology, it's the pilots. Higher class people can afford their own planes, but they're not exactly selling like hotcakes. Why? Because it takes a lot of hours to get your pilot's license. In order to make flying cars practical for mass-audiences (like they promise in PopSci), cars have to basically fly on their own. That sort of automation isn't all that practical today. GPS is helping, though...
For long round trip transmission you are right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why Repeat Our Mistakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
-JFK, 1962
In other words, it's inspiring. If not for the moon landing, a generation of scientists and engineers would've become something else, and our civilization would be the worse for it.
The reason we're seeing independent human spaceflight and governments starting to talk about ambitious space programs again is that those people have grown up and are wondering what happened to their dreams. If we get humans out to the moon and Mars in the next few decades, we will fulfill some of those dreams and give new ones to our children.
Re:Why Repeat Our Mistakes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Millions of tourists travel yearly to well documented locations. Would their $5,000 vacation to tour Italy be better spent just reading some books and looking at the pictures. I mean then you don't have to worry about lost luggage, weather, being robbed, getting lost etc...
I know most geeks don't really understand but there is more to life than knowledge.
Re:Why Repeat Our Mistakes? (Score:2, Insightful)
Having said all that, I tend to agree with you. Humans are a burden on these missions -- we may be flexible of mind, but we are not flexible of body, especially when considering the time-periods involved in travelling to other Solar System bodies. I think the success of the Mars rovers has proved that robots have a real future in space.
Re:Nanotech? (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought Nanotech was still in its infancy.
Right, which is why they're developing it. In ten years, a human infant is no longer an infant. Of course, it remains to be seen whether nanotech can sustain a similar level of growth.
Re:Lowered cost? (Score:2, Insightful)
You make the assumption that airline flight is going to be cost driven with discounts and frequent flyer plans.
Cost reductions will only happen if there is significant competition from cost consious buyers. The airline market will have to change a lot before that happens.
Re:Meanwhile... (Score:2, Insightful)
You are correct that today the cost of oil is high and will be so, but it is not the end all to travel by vehicles. This is something that MUST be recognized. An alternative will be produced.
Re:Two words (Score:3, Insightful)
there are far bigger problems we need to resolve on earth, such as oil dependency. if these countries dumped this money into a "alternative fuel race" instead of a space race, we would have more expendable income because we would be free from the harness of oil. lets worry about this planet first before we start wasting tax money again.
Because we CAN. (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA has one man rated vehicle that is grossly expensive to launch, has a turnaround that is at best seasonal, and is currently used to service a barely sustainable habitat that is essentially a badly under-crewed garbage barge orbiting too low to avoid reentry without constant readjustment.
NASA, assuming they have ANY interest in the future of manned spaceflight, just isn't getting the job done. Competition is good. It took getting our ass handed to us by the Russians with Sputnik, etc. for us to even start giving a shit about space- if China or Japan puts a man on the moon, you can bet we'll be busting ass to beat them to mars.
500 years ago you probably would have been insisting on a land route to china, since it's Safe And Proven and Doesn't Risk Equipment Or Lives, etc, etc.
Re:Two words (Score:5, Insightful)
No problem is two dimensional. In the real world, society is intertwined, you change one part of society, you can and usually will change it all. It's in part reflected in the law of unintended consequences. It is unreasonable to look at the worlds problems from a purely utilitarian point of view. It doesn't reflect the fact that yes we are humans and as such there are no simple answers.
This kind of reasoning is the same kind of reasoning that leads to people cutting funding for theoretical scientific work because there is no practical use for it, as you clearly are suggesting. How to use knowledge typically is not obvious when it is discovered.
I suggest you examine the possibility that people can tackle multiple problems at the same time. It is also worth considering that attacking problems from a two dimension point of view will end up causing new problems and is not the most efficient way of running a human society.
Re:Uh-oh... (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't have to be so closed-minded and nationalistic. I think its fantastic that China, India and now Japan are working on their space programs, as they'll no doubt bring things that Europe, the US and Russia would not. What's more, any 'space race' that leads to "us" being overtaken can only encourage "our" governments to increase spending on space.
Re:Wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
Reliability is also a major show-stopper. It you have the present airplane catastrophic failure rate multiplied a thousand times flying over our heads in any major city, you can easily see the point why a flying car is a very bad idea. Add to that the fact that most car owners are very sloppy with proper maintenance and you can see an even worse scenario. Do you really want them flying over your house?
Increased reliability means increased cost. Every tiny little bit of reliability planes get costs a lot of money.
Re:Spiral Development Might Be a Good Idea... (Score:3, Insightful)
Noble on paper, but thats not really how things are done. I grew up in a country [visittnt.com] where about 30% of the households had a landlline phone up until about 1998 (which is when I left)I went back in 2002 and about 80% of the had atleast one cellphone and even less people had landlines.
It isn't always neccessary to follow the line of advancement that others did.
Incidently the reason I know that is because there's only one telecom company in the whole country. I could make a killing if I had a couple million to invest in cellsites...
Re:Why Repeat Our Mistakes? (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, I think space exploration should be driven by a long term plan for giving a solid payback in science or even profit. This will not be done by having mechanical toys drive around in ditches or staying in low earth orbit testing if frog legs twitch the same way in microgravity.
Another point I'd like to make is that I remain skeptical of the cost-effectiveness of robots vs. humans. Sure, a manned mission will cost several orders of magnitude more than an unmanned one, but consider the other problems of robots:
They're sloooow.
MER is fast compared to pathfinder, but it'll still only drive a few feet every day.
They're STUPID.
You can't ask a rover to do anything else than what it has been painstakingly designed for. MER has 5 simple instruments plus a few more passive ones. A manned expedition could have hundreds, and the possibility of combining them.
They're weak and clumsy.
You can't ask them to turn over a large rock to look what's under it. Or go looking for caves and explore them.
We had a conversation about this at my university(we designed the (passive)magnetic properties experiment), and decided that a manned mission could accomplish as much data collection in an afternoon as the Viking probes had in their mission. In a couple of days, a couple of astronauts could accomplish more than all landers put together.
And something to think about: what knowledge of other bodies could we gain by sending carbon water-bags instead of metallic automatons that would otherwise be totally impossible?
Technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Trying to solve a problem is one of the fastest ways to come up with solutions to that problem. We are currently enjoying many of the technological advances acheived by (or for) the manned space program. Waiting for technology to advance enough to do something doesn't make as much sense as actively advancing it.
Re:Outsourcing (Score:2, Insightful)
My hasty wording made my serious point about ceding leadership in space sciences into flamebait. [And, upon reading it again, the flamebait tag was well-deserved.]
That said, leadership comes from the top. If leaders in the White House and Congress had thought that continued support of Hubble and Voyager were worthy, that would have set the tone and neither project would today be in trouble.
I stand corrected on your point of money being allocated but the NASA administrator not doing the right thing.