FleaPlus writes "Apollo 11 astronaut (and MIT Astronautics Sc.D.) Buzz Aldrin suggests a bolder plan for NASA (while still remaining within its budget), which he will present to the White House's Augustine Commission; he sees NASA heading down the wrong path with a 'rehash of what we did 40 years ago' which could derail future exploration and settlement. For the short-term, Aldrin suggests canceling NASA's troubled and increasingly costly Ares I, instead launching manned capsules on commercial Delta IV, Atlas V, and/or SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. In the medium-term, NASA should return to the moon with an international consortium, with the ultimate goal of commercial lunar exploitation in mind. Aldrin's long term plan includes a 2018 comet flyby, a 2019 manned trip to a near-earth asteroid, a 2025 trip to the Martian moon Phobos, and one-way trips to colonize Mars."
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday June 26 2009, @01:27AM (#28478195)
Seriously, NASA (and most space programs in general) should have one crucial long term goal: Getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones. I think that Aldrin's plans make more progress towards this than most of what has been going on for pretty much my entire lifetime.
NASA should be a regulatory agency, just like the FAA. But when you give regulation to a "competitor-in-the-field," amazingly, no-one else meets the regulatory requirements to compete. (offtopic/ Think of that when they talk about a "public insurance plan" too. \offtopic)
Poor Author C. I wish he had lived to see his 2001 visions come to life. . .
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday June 26 2009, @01:51AM (#28478359)
Not just NASA and space programs. A good chunk of our entire worlds resources should be devoted to getting us off this rock.
Sooner or later we will have a global disaster that WILL wipe us out. Volcano, comet, magnetic shift, meteor, gamma ray burst, germ, ect ect ect... And then what. we're done. no more humans. haha. game over.
Instead we bicker over who owns what dirt and what invisible superbeing is watching us try to die with more stuff than everyone else.........
Maybe its not such a bad idea to wipe us out. We're insane.
I'm a lifelong NASA nut and space fan, and my fantasies are as elaborate as anyone's but that's all it is - fantasy.
There are billions of people on this planet, and counting. We would have to launch over 200,000 people a day into space each day just to keep up with the daily increase in the population, without even making a dent in the "reserve."
Apart from thousands of years off Nivenesque dreams of turning the planet itself into a spaceship, we just stuck here and we have to face it.
The absolute best we could hope to achieve is to launch a very select elite by using far more than their fair share of resources, while leaving essentially the entire human populace behind to deal with the consequences.
And when they left, then what? Here we are with a perfectly self-regulating ecosystem in the prime location with conditions tailor made for us (or rather us for them), and we can't understand it well enough or control our own impulses well enough to keep from fucking it up.... but somehow we'll be smart enough to go somewhere else less opportune and build one from scratch?
"Get us off this rock" attitudes are the product of denial, passing the buck to the our future victims, the ultimate expression of our throw-away consumer culture. We'll use up this planet, toss it and get a new one.
No. Exploration of space is vital to scientific knowledge and indeed to our attempts to understand earth (as exploring Venus helped us understand global warming) but as a species we are stuck with what we have and we'd better take care of it, there's nowhere else in the neighborhood worth anything more than an outpost.
If a sentient species from earth ever DOES spread out far enough to fully leave Earth behind for good, it won't be Homo Sapiens who does it... it would be far enough in the future that either our descendant species (or something else's) will be doing it.
Really? Have you read your Darwin? Are you aware of how much of natural selection takes place? Often, it happens because a population gets isolated due to the destruction of the main population.
You may think it's fantasy, but keep in mind that eventually, a life-killer asteroid strike, while extremely unlikely in any given year, is eventually a mathematical certainty. By all the best evidence, it has happened before, probably more than once.
It may be a long-term goal, but eventually we must send at least some people "off this rock". Scoff all you want, but that is playing the real probabilities.
We would have to launch over 200,000 people a day into space each day just to keep up with the daily increase in the population
You are right, shipping people off to other planets without making other changes, such as reducing birthrate, is not going to reduce population of Earth. However, if your goal (among others, such as access to new resources) is to ensure the survival of the species should something horrible happen on Earth, then a long term plan to spread to one or two other worlds does make a lot of sense. A self sustaining base on Mars is not a fantasy, it is something that could possibly be achieved with today's technology if the will was there. In 50 years, just as the biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction are getting within reach of even small groups of psychos, it will be no problem at all. You have to make a first step somewhere.
A self-sustaining base must have the capability to expand (or else it'll just shrivel up and die as soon as a minor disaster strikes. Teetering on the brink of self-sustaining really is _not_ self-sustaining.). And once you have that capability, there's exponential growth and you'll have a colony sooner or later.
Blah blah blah. Planes can't fly, we've never seen the bottom of the ocean, we'll never walk on the moon, we can't see what's happening on the other side of the planet in real time, if you go over 20mph you'll suffocate, if you sail west you'll drop off the edge of the world, the atom is the smallest thing in the universe, don't go outside, you'll be hit by a bus....
Do you have any balls ?
We don't need to create self-sustaining colonies in Antarctica, or underwater, so why do it ? If you put yourself in space, you not only need to, you have to deal with it. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I guess in the slimy greedy world of Intellectual Property, you would rather just accumulate wealth for yourself, fuck the universe (and your neighbours). If the only way we can have a space colony is to replicate exactly what we have here, then you're right - it's a waste of time. If you want to head in a new direction however, space is the ONLY place to do it. This planet's full of nay-saying assholes.
BTW, you missed out Burger King and Walmart from your list of "necessities".
I would argue that the main advantage of the "get us off this rock crap" is that at some point we are absolutely going to take an extinction-level hit from some other rock, or a massive solar flare that toasts half the planet, or some other damned thing. If we don't spread across several worlds, we vastly increase the likelihood of becoming just another trilobite bed.
It isn't merely a matter of fixing the earth, which I wholeheartedly agree is of prime importance; off-world colonies are essential for the survival of the species. We don't need to colonize only Mars and Luna; we need to colonize other star systems. Gamma-ray bursts, supernovas and asteroid impacts aren't imaginary bogeymen. The universe is an incredibly dangerous place, and so far we've been lucky, but that's only because we're new in the neighborhood. The geologic record is littered with evidence that bad shit happens. Hell, just look at a map of Canada. Lake Manicouagan in Quebec was created by a chunk of rock three miles wide.
At some point terrestrial homo sapiens is guaranteed to take an irrecoverable hit, and if we haven't put down roots elsewhere, that's it for humanity and any of our eventual descendants.
So yes, we have to get off of this goddamned rock, and the sooner the better. I'm astonished anyone even bothers to argue about this.
Ben Bova had this same idea in "The Winds of Altair", a kids book where they go to a planet around Altair because the Earth is getting too polluted to live on. The plan to convert it's methane atmosphere to regular air, but they find inhabitants, prove they are intelligent, and decide that the methane to oxygen transmuters could convert Earth's polluted air to clean air, so they go back.
Once we can sustain a colony outside earth, we can use the same technology to live here. The real reason to leave would be political, to keep the population from being killed off by war.
I don't see the big plus of inhabiting other "gravity wells". It's not like they're that much nicer places, and it'll be expensive to get back off them.
Better to work on building sustainable space stations with necessary stuff like artificial gravity and radiation shielding, so that people can actually live on them _indefinitely_. Start by building them near the Earth. After that work on space stations that can build space stations out of stuff like asteroids - space factories. Then we can have space colonies and roam about colonizing the solar system.
Once you have a sustainable space station, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get to Mars or Titan (within reason of course). No rush.
In fact, the long term inhabitants of space colonies might view living on Mars or the Moon far more unpleasant than living in a space colony.
Trying to live on some other planet or some moon without having a "real" space station seems like trying to jump before even being able to stand unsupported. Yes, maybe you can still do it with great effort and cost, but it's ridiculous and stupid.
The current space stations don't count - they're spaceships "going nowhere", the equivalent of living in a cramped subcompact car. Not suitable places for raising future generations of humans.
Seriously, NASA (and most space programs in general) should have one crucial long term goal: Getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones
NASA is a government agency ( an arthritic one ), government agencies don't colonize. Especially when international law explicitly forbids that.
What most people miss in 2001: Space Odyssey, are the logos on the space plane and Space Station V itself, where dr. Heywood flies to . They read "Pan American" and "Hilton Hotels" accordingly, NOT NASA, RSA or any other *SA.
Ironically, when time called for beating the communists to the moon, the great U.S. of A. did not tap into free enterprise, but created a huge socialist government-run space business, which 40 years later still thinks it should be running a space trucking line.
By necessity; free enterprise has never produced a viable manned orbital space programme..
Have you looked into the matter of WHY ? Without giving away too much, when you research the matter, you'll run into interesting terms like obstructionism, turf protection, pork politics, ITAR, entrenched interests and common misconceptions, perpetuated by certain groups and so on.
Nevertheless, there are several companies currently on track to start operating manned spaceflight vehicles, and when commercially successful with orbital versions thereof later. SpaceX is shooting for manned orbital from the get-go, with or without government subsidies.
and really struggles with unmanned ones.
Huh ?? Do you have any idea about the volume of the global commercial launch market, every year ? It isnt a "programme", as you put it. It a transportation market like any other. Currently with military lineage going back to ICBMs, but commercial market nevertheless.
What do you mean by "really struggles" ?
I think we will get off this rock. But not in the form that you might think of.
We will send out robots. With our brains uploaded into them. And robots with a high intelligence. We will also create wetware robots. We will move from planet to planet via data transmission. From robot body to robot body... to wetware body. In a way, we could call this the "energy lifeform" that you see in so many sci-fi movies.
So, in some time in the future, "humans" will be a term, associated to the "program" (or whatever it will be), and not to the body itself. That will just be another tool.
Except it's not a colossal amount of money at all--this is the absurd misconception about space travel. The reality is it is peanuts. Cheaper in fact than fixing this world, by a several orders of magnitude.
True - the NASA budget is about 1/20th what our total military expenditures are if you leave out the ongoing operational costs that are not in the primary budget. http://throb.typepad.com/special/2004%20US%20Budget.jpg [typepad.com]
If we spent as much on space exploration as we did on the military or on bank bailouts for just one year we would have an endowment capable of funding permanent bases on the moon and robotic development of Mars.
Because we could put something much larger, more powerful, and decades newer than the Hubble on it. A telescope array on the Moon could accomplish orders of magnitudes more than the Hubble plus our land based observatories. You could place a large radio telescope array - more powerful than a satellite telescope - like you have on Earth, but without the atmospheric and EM interference you get down here.
The moon is also an astoundingly good - and close- source of Helium-3. Helium-3 is a particularly good potential fusion fuel. A good way to consider how much energy this could mean is to understand that there is more energy in the He-3 on the Moon than there ever has been in all fossil fuels on the Earth. The problem with He-3 though is that, on Earth at least, it's pretty rare stuff.
No we shouldn't. Firstly, because there is simply no way we can mine fast enough to significantly change the mass of the moon within the forseeable future. Secondly the moon is becomming heavier all the time because rocks from space crash there (same applies to the earth). And last but not least since gravity scales with mass, making the the moon lighter should not (significantly) affect its orbit.
And actually, I could continue copying links for a long time. This is just barely scraping the surface. The space program has paid for itself many times over (one conservative estimate is 3 times) with advances to technology and industry.
Yes. Yes I would. Absolutely, without a doubt. Where do I sign up?
Spending all the money fixing this world does nothing to get all of our eggs out of the basket, and if anything harms that basket, then we are screwed. To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out. We aren't going to do that by spending all of our money and resources here. We aren't even going to do that by pussy-footing around sending only robotic explorers to other places (as much as admire these feats of engineering and the data they bring back). We are only going to do that by getting out there and doing it ourselves. And it will only become cheaper, easier, and safer as we do it more and more and more.
So, one way ticket to Mars? Titan? Points outward? HELL YES. I wouldn't hesitate to accept such an opportunity, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
> To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out.
Dude, unless some meteor comes along and kills us all, we still have *millions* of years to perfect space travel. If we delay manned missions to other planets/moons for half a century, it won't matter. If you really care so much about the survival of the species, you'd be encouraging research that can protect us from really big rocks on a collision course with ours, rather than trying to get a colony on titan.
It's funny how you're using "Won't somebody think of the HUMAN RACE?!?!?!?!" like politicians would use "Won't somebody think of the children?!?!?!", using it to support your agenda by accusing your opponents of 'not caring about the survival of the species'.
If we delay manned missions to other planets/moons for half a century, it won't matter.
Actually, there are some who think that is untrue, and here's why. The cost of feeding the world is ever rising as the population climbs. As the population climbs the amount of land available to grow things falls. At the moment, finding the few billions it might take to get us off-world just seems expensive, but at some point finding those billions may actually require taking the decision to stop feeding some people and that will be a tough decision for anyone to make!
There are some who suggest that if we don't det off-world NOW we may never have the spare cash to throw at it again, and that's a BIG risk for the survival of our species, and presumably all the species we take along with us for the ride. Though, to be fair, they often quote 100 years as "NOW", but it's still a gamble upon which our species very survival may rest!
Not only that, but I'd like to see it at least start to happen!
At the very least, development of working Biosphere type environments, increases your survival ANYWHERE, and is a necessary precondition for long-term survival on other worlds or deep space.
Well, for one thing, a manned space program keeps some very intelligent scientists and engineers employed. It also hopefully captures the imagination of the youth to provide us with another generation of scientists and engineers.
We keep complaining that math and science education in this country keeps sliding. Giving kids something tangible that says "math and science can be fun and exciting" is what we need.
Plus it's not like 100 billion dollars gets strapped to a rocket and blasted into space. Most of the money spent is put straight into the economy (through salaries). The only actual "loss" is the cost of the raw material sent into space.
better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
Lets see...spend peanuts on the space program or
1) spend billions on clean up of a world where we have to rely on the other guy to keep his country clean.
2) spend billions on clean up of a world only to have some other cataclysm happen:
a) asteroid
b) plague
c) world war
I'd rather spend the money on the space program. Not only is it cheaper, but it also fits in with our own nature. Since we evolved, humans have not had to clean up after themselves; however, since the beginning humans have been explorers.
I'd rather play to mankind's strengths and continue exploring.
....Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world....
Uh-huh; I heard that before, way back in 1969, in fact. Did a bang-up job on that, didn't we? . Listen, meathead, before you go parroting crap that was utter drivel 40 years ago, perhaps you should compare NASA'a annual budget against, say, oh maybe the amount of money the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the U.S. Department of Defense burns through in a WEEK. . Then, please be so kind as to examine the RETURN ON INVESTMENT on those three budgets. . Yeah; we're really 'fixing' this world. . Idiot.
Don't worry, start a Reality TV show called: "Vote Them Off The Planet".
Depending on the categories, winners get a one way or return ticket to various space destinations.
The voters pay for the tickets by voting (SMS etc).
And depending on the categories, either the candidates or someone else presents the case for why the candidates should win.
For example:
Proposer #1: "I propose George Bush, 'one way', since he's so keen on going to the Moon, we should send him and it would be a net benefit to the world".
...punch Bart Sibrel in the mouth. Repeatedly.
My only criticism of Buzz Aldrin is he didn't plant his feet hard enough to break Sibrel's jaw with the punch. And have me there so I could hold Buzz's coat.
Hey! Maybe we could fire Sibrel at Mars to colonize it on his own. And then deny he ever existed.
Most astronauts have refused to grant him interviews due to his questionable tactics used in attempts to obtain footage of them confessing to being conspirators in a hoax. The most infamous incident involved Apollo 11 crew member Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. According to Aldrin, he was lured to a Beverly Hills hotel under the pretext of an interview on space for a Japanese children's television show. When he arrived, Aldrin claims Sibrel was there demanding that he swear on a Bible that he had walked on the moon.
When Aldrin refused, Sibrel called him a coward, a liar, and a thief. Aldrin punched Sibrel in the jaw and the incident was captured on video. Sibrel later attempted to use the tape to convince police and prosecutors that he was the victim of an assault. However, it was decided that Aldrin had been provoked, and did not actually injure Sibrel, and so no charges were filed. Many talk show hosts aired the clip.
Good idea ditching the extra launch vehicles. Let someone else take the risk if you can.
But an international consortium? Did he even pay attention to station?
International consortiums are great, if your goal is "to work together with other nations towards a goal." But they tend to fail miserably if you have something you want to actually accomplish. You end up doing everything redundantly anyway, and somehow it costs even more than just the redundancy ought to account for.
The only upside to the consortium idea is also a huge downside: you can sort-of force certain milestones by making them treaty obligations. Unfortunately, then you have a pile of treaty obligations in your way if you need to scrap part of the project to go down a better avenue, or you just want to cut your losses and get out.
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration. * People wanting to kill each other more efficiently. * Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness. It's about time we shifted our space program out of neutral and brought back the creativity and blue sky thinking that went on in the 1950s and 1960s. What NASA has been doing the past 10 years or so has been minor league and simply lacking ambition. Setting big goals and developing the ideas and technology to reach those goals is what our people are investing in.
To the robot mafia: YOU DON'T GET IT. Space exploration is not just about getting data. Sure, collecting data is important. But so is forcing man to grow and adapt to new challenges. The scientific advancements driven by the space program in the past are in large part due to making it possible for a person to travel and explore a hostile environment over impossible differences. Sending humans is expensive, complex and risky, but is rewarding thousandfold beyond it's cost. Exploring space with robots is easy and cheap but does not drive the kind of thinking that changes the world as the space programs of the 50s, 60s and 70s did.
Another note to the robot mafia: Robots killing people is a bad idea. Actually, so is people killing people.
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration. * People wanting to kill each other more efficiently. * Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness.
Yes, because getting the funding to run a huge missile program right after the cuban missile crisis during the height of the cold war was soooooooo about taking money away from "People wanting to kill each other more efficiently." and gicing it to an altruistic aspiration to greatness. Sure, it came in a very nice sales package with a civilian agency and a great morale booster but the reason it passed was that it created lots and lots of high tech research and equipment of military value. If it was about "aspiring to greatness" why would the russians break their back trying to keep up with it? The other two points are timeless classics though. Add "Getting the girl" and you've summed up the reasons for most of humanity's innovation...
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
But that isn't happening, is it? It won't happen. It doesn't happen. That's the key problem here. I guess that's the thinking from congress and other governments from the mid-80s to now is: "Isn't the money better spent on the ground fixing real problems?". Well that's the primary excuse to not fund space exploration. What really happens is the money ends up going down all the usual bottomless holes of the government, and dare I say it: this world is possibly too broke to fix.
IMHO, directing public funds to specific, dedicated, scientific endeavors is the single best thing that can be done with government money. Sure roads need fixing and schools need resources, but discretionary government spending should not be diverted to the endless bottomless pits of public resources, because they are always needing more money. The money just disappears. A dollar spent on space exploration eventually generates a hell of a lot of useful science and engineering.
By one famous quote every dollar spent on the Apollo program generated seven dollars for the US economy.
This is what governments don't get about science, even if the LHC never fires up, and never turns out anything useful, it actually would have been terrifically useful, since it has already generated a lot of scientific just to figure out how to build it. Not to mention all the Internet 2.0 infrastructure put in place by universities etc to handle all the data it will output. So this is why we need to get on with the job of going back to the moon, and to mars, to stay.
There's almost no such thing as useless science, and on the most useful level of all, space exploration is species-saving level stuff.
Spending up on aerospace tech usually trickles down to the private sector. A lot of political leaders do not understand what the billions of dollars the US poured into science and engineering during the cold war have done to the world today: Basically pretty much everything we have, and take utterly for granted as a technological civilization now can be traced back to the space race in the cold war. Even the beginnings of silicon valley goes back to cold war funded roots.
Right now, dollar for dollar putting a human in space to do science is much better value than the equivalent robot.
it saddens me that people like you still bitch about commercial ventures, when you wouldn't have the PC or internet to do so if it wasn't for such ventures. repeat after me - just because it's being done for money, it doesn't mean it's evil....
Would you rather see Mars as an eternally dead rustball, or a thriving new home for humanity, full of farms, factories and cities? And if millions of people are ever going to participate in exploration and colonization, how exactly are they going to get food (or even air!) from the new and hostile environment other than by "exploiting" it? And should we expect them to live non-commercially and work together out of selfless collectivism, as on Star Trek? They tried that method in Jamestown and Plymouth for a while -- and the death rate was incredible.
Also, I don't see how the concept of "enslavement" can be applied to an inanimate object.
Go ahead, tell me how sending dozens of rovers exploring the whole solar system and/or having a look at Proxima Centauri's planets is any less interesting for the general public than watching a bunch of bozos awkwardly trying to bolt a nut in 0g.
Why would anyone care what is interesting or not? The purpose of space flight is gain the ability to colonize (as in moving people out there) space. All we do we do for survival, and colonizing space is vital for survival. That is why we need manned space flight.
That's just a canard. The only thing we learn from manned spaceflight is that it's really expensive. If we want to colonize other worlds we need to spend the money doing the research and developing the technologies we need, not wasting money sending people on weekend getaways to airless rocks or spacestations that will deorbit in ten years.
For the price of "setting foot on Mars" you could have hundreds or thousands of robots circling it, drilling it, terraforming it and beaming back terrabytes of data every second.
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
The story I heard was thus: There is a process called "man-rating" which means that you certify a particular launch vehicle to be able to carry a capsule containing people. The process is sort of like ISO9000 or whatever. Essentially, you have gobs of documentation that say things like, "this bolt will fail in this circumstance. The resulting stress on the other 20 bolts is X" "In the event that this tube leaks, the pressure will be Y" In some cases, you have to make things redundant: "the failure rate of this pump is X, which is beyond the risk tolerance for manned flight, so we have this backup pump - the chance that both pumps will fail is Y"
Bottom line: you might have to replace or redesign parts of the rocket in order to make it man-rated. And what I was told is that it might actually be more expensive to man-rate a Delta IV heavy, than to simply design a man-rated rocket like Ares from the ground up.
It's kind of paternalistic to condemn manned spaceflight as risky when the risk is something that many astronauts assume gladly for the chance to experience space.
The inherent risk of manned spaceflight is an argument that people tend to throw in to give their otherwise self-serving cost arguments a false feeling of moral weight.
No. Self sustaining colonies should be practiced in orbit around the Earth.
The moon is an X day trip, whereas the time to orbit is much shorter. It's easier to help them if things go wrong.
Once you have self sustaining colonies in space, it doesn't matter so much how long it takes to get to Mars.
But people might then think, hey why bother landing humans on Mars, we'll just stay in our comfy space stations and send robot probes down to mars, while we mine the asteroids (and build more probes if necessary).
Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, NASA (and most space programs in general) should have one crucial long term goal: Getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones. I think that Aldrin's plans make more progress towards this than most of what has been going on for pretty much my entire lifetime.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, one step closer to living my fantasy life like in Firefly. They can cancel the show but they can't stop the Serenity
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.spacefuture.com/vehicles/how_the_west_wasnt_won_nafa.shtml [spacefuture.com]
NASA should be a regulatory agency, just like the FAA. But when you give regulation to a "competitor-in-the-field," amazingly, no-one else meets the regulatory requirements to compete.
(offtopic/ Think of that when they talk about a "public insurance plan" too. \offtopic)
Poor Author C. I wish he had lived to see his 2001 visions come to life. . .
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not just NASA and space programs. A good chunk of our entire worlds resources should be devoted to getting us off this rock.
Sooner or later we will have a global disaster that WILL wipe us out. Volcano, comet, magnetic shift, meteor, gamma ray burst, germ, ect ect ect... And then what. we're done. no more humans. haha. game over.
Instead we bicker over who owns what dirt and what invisible superbeing is watching us try to die with more stuff than everyone else.........
Maybe its not such a bad idea to wipe us out. We're insane.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am so tired of the "get us off this rock" crap.
I'm a lifelong NASA nut and space fan, and my fantasies are as elaborate as anyone's but that's all it is - fantasy.
There are billions of people on this planet, and counting. We would have to launch over 200,000 people a day into space each day just to keep up with the daily increase in the population, without even making a dent in the "reserve."
Apart from thousands of years off Nivenesque dreams of turning the planet itself into a spaceship, we just stuck here and we have to face it.
The absolute best we could hope to achieve is to launch a very select elite by using far more than their fair share of resources, while leaving essentially the entire human populace behind to deal with the consequences.
And when they left, then what? Here we are with a perfectly self-regulating ecosystem in the prime location with conditions tailor made for us (or rather us for them), and we can't understand it well enough or control our own impulses well enough to keep from fucking it up.... but somehow we'll be smart enough to go somewhere else less opportune and build one from scratch?
"Get us off this rock" attitudes are the product of denial, passing the buck to the our future victims, the ultimate expression of our throw-away consumer culture. We'll use up this planet, toss it and get a new one.
No. Exploration of space is vital to scientific knowledge and indeed to our attempts to understand earth (as exploring Venus helped us understand global warming) but as a species we are stuck with what we have and we'd better take care of it, there's nowhere else in the neighborhood worth anything more than an outpost.
If a sentient species from earth ever DOES spread out far enough to fully leave Earth behind for good, it won't be Homo Sapiens who does it... it would be far enough in the future that either our descendant species (or something else's) will be doing it.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
You may think it's fantasy, but keep in mind that eventually, a life-killer asteroid strike, while extremely unlikely in any given year, is eventually a mathematical certainty. By all the best evidence, it has happened before, probably more than once.
It may be a long-term goal, but eventually we must send at least some people "off this rock". Scoff all you want, but that is playing the real probabilities.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Funny)
You're proposing the mother of all offsite backups!
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right, shipping people off to other planets without making other changes, such as reducing birthrate, is not going to reduce population of Earth. However, if your goal (among others, such as access to new resources) is to ensure the survival of the species should something horrible happen on Earth, then a long term plan to spread to one or two other worlds does make a lot of sense. A self sustaining base on Mars is not a fantasy, it is something that could possibly be achieved with today's technology if the will was there. In 50 years, just as the biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction are getting within reach of even small groups of psychos, it will be no problem at all. You have to make a first step somewhere.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
A self-sustaining base must have the capability to expand (or else it'll just shrivel up and die as soon as a minor disaster strikes. Teetering on the brink of self-sustaining really is _not_ self-sustaining.). And once you have that capability, there's exponential growth and you'll have a colony sooner or later.
Parent
Re:"Self sustaining base" (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you have any balls ?
We don't need to create self-sustaining colonies in Antarctica, or underwater, so why do it ? If you put yourself in space, you not only need to, you have to deal with it. Necessity is the mother of invention. But I guess in the slimy greedy world of Intellectual Property, you would rather just accumulate wealth for yourself, fuck the universe (and your neighbours). If the only way we can have a space colony is to replicate exactly what we have here, then you're right - it's a waste of time. If you want to head in a new direction however, space is the ONLY place to do it. This planet's full of nay-saying assholes.
BTW, you missed out Burger King and Walmart from your list of "necessities".
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that the main advantage of the "get us off this rock crap" is that at some point we are absolutely going to take an extinction-level hit from some other rock, or a massive solar flare that toasts half the planet, or some other damned thing. If we don't spread across several worlds, we vastly increase the likelihood of becoming just another trilobite bed.
It isn't merely a matter of fixing the earth, which I wholeheartedly agree is of prime importance; off-world colonies are essential for the survival of the species. We don't need to colonize only Mars and Luna; we need to colonize other star systems. Gamma-ray bursts, supernovas and asteroid impacts aren't imaginary bogeymen. The universe is an incredibly dangerous place, and so far we've been lucky, but that's only because we're new in the neighborhood. The geologic record is littered with evidence that bad shit happens. Hell, just look at a map of Canada. Lake Manicouagan in Quebec was created by a chunk of rock three miles wide.
At some point terrestrial homo sapiens is guaranteed to take an irrecoverable hit, and if we haven't put down roots elsewhere, that's it for humanity and any of our eventual descendants.
So yes, we have to get off of this goddamned rock, and the sooner the better. I'm astonished anyone even bothers to argue about this.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:4, Insightful)
Once we can sustain a colony outside earth, we can use the same technology to live here. The real reason to leave would be political, to keep the population from being killed off by war.
Parent
Gravity wells (Score:5, Insightful)
Better to work on building sustainable space stations with necessary stuff like artificial gravity and radiation shielding, so that people can actually live on them _indefinitely_. Start by building them near the Earth. After that work on space stations that can build space stations out of stuff like asteroids - space factories. Then we can have space colonies and roam about colonizing the solar system.
Once you have a sustainable space station, it doesn't really matter how long it takes to get to Mars or Titan (within reason of course). No rush.
In fact, the long term inhabitants of space colonies might view living on Mars or the Moon far more unpleasant than living in a space colony.
Trying to live on some other planet or some moon without having a "real" space station seems like trying to jump before even being able to stand unsupported. Yes, maybe you can still do it with great effort and cost, but it's ridiculous and stupid.
The current space stations don't count - they're spaceships "going nowhere", the equivalent of living in a cramped subcompact car. Not suitable places for raising future generations of humans.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA is a government agency ( an arthritic one ), government agencies don't colonize. Especially when international law explicitly forbids that.
What most people miss in 2001: Space Odyssey, are the logos on the space plane and Space Station V itself, where dr. Heywood flies to . They read "Pan American" and "Hilton Hotels" accordingly, NOT NASA, RSA or any other *SA.
Ironically, when time called for beating the communists to the moon, the great U.S. of A. did not tap into free enterprise, but created a huge socialist government-run space business, which 40 years later still thinks it should be running a space trucking line.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Informative)
Have you looked into the matter of WHY ? Without giving away too much, when you research the matter, you'll run into interesting terms like obstructionism, turf protection, pork politics, ITAR, entrenched interests and common misconceptions, perpetuated by certain groups and so on.
Nevertheless, there are several companies currently on track to start operating manned spaceflight vehicles, and when commercially successful with orbital versions thereof later. SpaceX is shooting for manned orbital from the get-go, with or without government subsidies.
and really struggles with unmanned ones.
Huh ?? Do you have any idea about the volume of the global commercial launch market, every year ? It isnt a "programme", as you put it. It a transportation market like any other. Currently with military lineage going back to ICBMs, but commercial market nevertheless.
What do you mean by "really struggles" ?
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we will get off this rock. But not in the form that you might think of.
We will send out robots. With our brains uploaded into them. And robots with a high intelligence.
We will also create wetware robots. We will move from planet to planet via data transmission. From robot body to robot body... to wetware body.
In a way, we could call this the "energy lifeform" that you see in so many sci-fi movies.
So, in some time in the future, "humans" will be a term, associated to the "program" (or whatever it will be), and not to the body itself. That will just be another tool.
I wonder, what porn we will be watching. ^^
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
Except it's not a colossal amount of money at all--this is the absurd misconception about space travel. The reality is it is peanuts. Cheaper in fact than fixing this world, by a several orders of magnitude.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Informative)
Most Americans also believe we should increase spending on NASA.
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2007/01/10/bad-and-good-news-about-public-support-for-space/ [spacepolitics.com]
If we spent as much on space exploration as we did on the military or on bank bailouts for just one year we would have an endowment capable of funding permanent bases on the moon and robotic development of Mars.
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Re:for what purpose? To mess up the moon? (Score:5, Funny)
IT'S THE MOON. Jesus.
Parent
Re:for what purpose? To mess up the moon? (Score:5, Funny)
IT'S THE MOON. Jesus.
You think Jesus didn't know that???
Parent
Re:for what purpose? To mess up the moon? (Score:5, Interesting)
The moon is also an astoundingly good - and close- source of Helium-3. Helium-3 is a particularly good potential fusion fuel. A good way to consider how much energy this could mean is to understand that there is more energy in the He-3 on the Moon than there ever has been in all fossil fuels on the Earth. The problem with He-3 though is that, on Earth at least, it's pretty rare stuff.
Parent
Re:for what purpose? To mess up the moon? (Score:5, Interesting)
No we shouldn't. Firstly, because there is simply no way we can mine fast enough to significantly change the mass of the moon within the forseeable future. Secondly the moon is becomming heavier all the time because rocks from space crash there (same applies to the earth). And last but not least since gravity scales with mass, making the the moon lighter should not (significantly) affect its orbit.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Interesting)
Neil Tyson on exploring space [discovermagazine.com]
10 Everyday Gadgets With Ties To The Space Program [gizmodo.com]
And actually, I could continue copying links for a long time. This is just barely scraping the surface. The space program has paid for itself many times over (one conservative estimate is 3 times) with advances to technology and industry.
Parent
Ummm... Yes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you want to live on titan?
Yes. Yes I would. Absolutely, without a doubt. Where do I sign up?
Spending all the money fixing this world does nothing to get all of our eggs out of the basket, and if anything harms that basket, then we are screwed. To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out. We aren't going to do that by spending all of our money and resources here. We aren't even going to do that by pussy-footing around sending only robotic explorers to other places (as much as admire these feats of engineering and the data they bring back). We are only going to do that by getting out there and doing it ourselves. And it will only become cheaper, easier, and safer as we do it more and more and more.
So, one way ticket to Mars? Titan? Points outward? HELL YES. I wouldn't hesitate to accept such an opportunity, and I doubt I'm alone in this.
Parent
Re:Ummm... Yes? (Score:5, Insightful)
> To paraphrase Carl Sagan in "Pale Blue Dot", any species that does not move off its planet is doomed to extinction. You may not care about the long term survival of the human species (or any other species), but some of us do, and the best way to increase our chances of survival is to spread out.
Dude, unless some meteor comes along and kills us all, we still have *millions* of years to perfect space travel. If we delay manned missions to other planets/moons for half a century, it won't matter. If you really care so much about the survival of the species, you'd be encouraging research that can protect us from really big rocks on a collision course with ours, rather than trying to get a colony on titan.
It's funny how you're using "Won't somebody think of the HUMAN RACE?!?!?!?!" like politicians would use "Won't somebody think of the children?!?!?!", using it to support your agenda by accusing your opponents of 'not caring about the survival of the species'.
Parent
Re:Ummm... Yes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, there are some who think that is untrue, and here's why. The cost of feeding the world is ever rising as the population climbs. As the population climbs the amount of land available to grow things falls. At the moment, finding the few billions it might take to get us off-world just seems expensive, but at some point finding those billions may actually require taking the decision to stop feeding some people and that will be a tough decision for anyone to make!
There are some who suggest that if we don't det off-world NOW we may never have the spare cash to throw at it again, and that's a BIG risk for the survival of our species, and presumably all the species we take along with us for the ride. Though, to be fair, they often quote 100 years as "NOW", but it's still a gamble upon which our species very survival may rest!
Not only that, but I'd like to see it at least start to happen!
Parent
Re:Ummm... Yes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
We keep complaining that math and science education in this country keeps sliding. Giving kids something tangible that says "math and science can be fun and exciting" is what we need.
Plus it's not like 100 billion dollars gets strapped to a rocket and blasted into space. Most of the money spent is put straight into the economy (through salaries). The only actual "loss" is the cost of the raw material sent into space.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:4, Interesting)
better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
Lets see...spend peanuts on the space program or
1) spend billions on clean up of a world where we have to rely on the other guy to keep his country clean.
2) spend billions on clean up of a world only to have some other cataclysm happen:
a) asteroid
b) plague
c) world war
I'd rather spend the money on the space program. Not only is it cheaper, but it also fits in with our own nature. Since we evolved, humans have not had to clean up after themselves; however, since the beginning humans have been explorers.
I'd rather play to mankind's strengths and continue exploring.
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:4, Insightful)
I would humbly suggest it is a skillset we LEARN, and learn it quickly and well.
RS
Parent
Re:Good ideas. (Score:5, Insightful)
....Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world....
Uh-huh; I heard that before, way back in 1969, in fact. Did a bang-up job on that, didn't we?
.
Listen, meathead, before you go parroting crap that was utter drivel 40 years ago, perhaps you should compare NASA'a annual budget against, say, oh maybe the amount of money the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or the U.S. Department of Defense burns through in a WEEK.
.
Then, please be so kind as to examine the RETURN ON INVESTMENT on those three budgets.
.
Yeah; we're really 'fixing' this world.
.
Idiot.
Parent
one way the only way to explore (Score:3, Interesting)
how much for a one way ticket?
No Australians on Mars... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, a one-way ticket to colonise some other place...
We believed you the first time, when you said we were all "Criminals" and needed to be sent to Australia.
We're going to be a bit more suspicious when you start sending us to Mars though for the same reason...
And it won't be for stealing bread this time I bet... Probably for downloading music or similar.
GrpA
Parent
Reality TV (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending on the categories, winners get a one way or return ticket to various space destinations.
The voters pay for the tickets by voting (SMS etc).
And depending on the categories, either the candidates or someone else presents the case for why the candidates should win.
For example:
Proposer #1: "I propose George Bush, 'one way', since he's so keen on going to the Moon, we should send him and it would be a net benefit to the world".
Parent
Oh and one final thing.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh and one final thing.... (Score:5, Informative)
Since I had to look it up: [wikipedia.org]
Most astronauts have refused to grant him interviews due to his questionable tactics used in attempts to obtain footage of them confessing to being conspirators in a hoax. The most infamous incident involved Apollo 11 crew member Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. According to Aldrin, he was lured to a Beverly Hills hotel under the pretext of an interview on space for a Japanese children's television show. When he arrived, Aldrin claims Sibrel was there demanding that he swear on a Bible that he had walked on the moon.
When Aldrin refused, Sibrel called him a coward, a liar, and a thief. Aldrin punched Sibrel in the jaw and the incident was captured on video. Sibrel later attempted to use the tape to convince police and prosecutors that he was the victim of an assault. However, it was decided that Aldrin had been provoked, and did not actually injure Sibrel, and so no charges were filed. Many talk show hosts aired the clip.
Parent
Re:Oh and one final thing.... (Score:5, Informative)
... and just to make sure everybody's curiousity is satisfied:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaUqaVj51w4 [youtube.com]
Sometimes violence is the answer...
Parent
Gah, no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Good idea ditching the extra launch vehicles. Let someone else take the risk if you can.
But an international consortium? Did he even pay attention to station?
International consortiums are great, if your goal is "to work together with other nations towards a goal." But they tend to fail miserably if you have something you want to actually accomplish. You end up doing everything redundantly anyway, and somehow it costs even more than just the redundancy ought to account for.
The only upside to the consortium idea is also a huge downside: you can sort-of force certain milestones by making them treaty obligations. Unfortunately, then you have a pile of treaty obligations in your way if you need to scrap part of the project to go down a better avenue, or you just want to cut your losses and get out.
About time we had some public debate (Score:4, Interesting)
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration.
* People wanting to kill each other more efficiently.
* Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness. It's about time we shifted our space program out of neutral and brought back the creativity and blue sky thinking that went on in the 1950s and 1960s. What NASA has been doing the past 10 years or so has been minor league and simply lacking ambition. Setting big goals and developing the ideas and technology to reach those goals is what our people are investing in.
To the robot mafia: YOU DON'T GET IT. Space exploration is not just about getting data. Sure, collecting data is important. But so is forcing man to grow and adapt to new challenges. The scientific advancements driven by the space program in the past are in large part due to making it possible for a person to travel and explore a hostile environment over impossible differences. Sending humans is expensive, complex and risky, but is rewarding thousandfold beyond it's cost. Exploring space with robots is easy and cheap but does not drive the kind of thinking that changes the world as the space programs of the 50s, 60s and 70s did.
Another note to the robot mafia: Robots killing people is a bad idea. Actually, so is people killing people.
Re:About time we had some public debate (Score:5, Insightful)
In my lifetime three things have driven technology's march:
* Space exploration.
* People wanting to kill each other more efficiently.
* Making a quick buck.
Of these, only space exploration is an example of Man aspiring to greatness.
Yes, because getting the funding to run a huge missile program right after the cuban missile crisis during the height of the cold war was soooooooo about taking money away from "People wanting to kill each other more efficiently." and gicing it to an altruistic aspiration to greatness. Sure, it came in a very nice sales package with a civilian agency and a great morale booster but the reason it passed was that it created lots and lots of high tech research and equipment of military value. If it was about "aspiring to greatness" why would the russians break their back trying to keep up with it? The other two points are timeless classics though. Add "Getting the girl" and you've summed up the reasons for most of humanity's innovation...
Parent
Good ideas / Deaf ears (Score:5, Interesting)
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
But that isn't happening, is it? It won't happen. It doesn't happen. That's the key problem here. I guess that's the thinking from congress and other governments from the mid-80s to now is: "Isn't the money better spent on the ground fixing real problems?". Well that's the primary excuse to not fund space exploration. What really happens is the money ends up going down all the usual bottomless holes of the government, and dare I say it: this world is possibly too broke to fix.
IMHO, directing public funds to specific, dedicated, scientific endeavors is the single best thing that can be done with government money. Sure roads need fixing and schools need resources, but discretionary government spending should not be diverted to the endless bottomless pits of public resources, because they are always needing more money. The money just disappears. A dollar spent on space exploration eventually generates a hell of a lot of useful science and engineering.
By one famous quote every dollar spent on the Apollo program generated seven dollars for the US economy.
This is what governments don't get about science, even if the LHC never fires up, and never turns out anything useful, it actually would have been terrifically useful, since it has already generated a lot of scientific just to figure out how to build it. Not to mention all the Internet 2.0 infrastructure put in place by universities etc to handle all the data it will output. So this is why we need to get on with the job of going back to the moon, and to mars, to stay.
There's almost no such thing as useless science, and on the most useful level of all, space exploration is species-saving level stuff.
Spending up on aerospace tech usually trickles down to the private sector. A lot of political leaders do not understand what the billions of dollars the US poured into science and engineering during the cold war have done to the world today: Basically pretty much everything we have, and take utterly for granted as a technological civilization now can be traced back to the space race in the cold war. Even the beginnings of silicon valley goes back to cold war funded roots.
Right now, dollar for dollar putting a human in space to do science is much better value than the equivalent robot.
Re:Commercial exploitation (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
"Commercial exploitation" is desirable! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, I don't see how the concept of "enslavement" can be applied to an inanimate object.
Parent
Re:Manned space flight is a fucking waste (Score:4, Insightful)
Go ahead, tell me how sending dozens of rovers exploring the whole solar system and/or having a look at Proxima Centauri's planets is any less interesting for the general public than watching a bunch of bozos awkwardly trying to bolt a nut in 0g.
Why would anyone care what is interesting or not? The purpose of space flight is gain the ability to colonize (as in moving people out there) space. All we do we do for survival, and colonizing space is vital for survival. That is why we need manned space flight.
Parent
Re:Manned space flight is a fucking waste (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just a canard. The only thing we learn from manned spaceflight is that it's really expensive. If we want to colonize other worlds we need to spend the money doing the research and developing the technologies we need, not wasting money sending people on weekend getaways to airless rocks or spacestations that will deorbit in ten years.
Parent
For the price of "setting foot on Mars" (Score:4, Insightful)
For the price of "setting foot on Mars" you could have hundreds or thousands of robots circling it, drilling it, terraforming it and beaming back terrabytes of data every second.
Parent
Re:For the price of "setting foot on Mars" (Score:5, Funny)
beaming back terrabytes of data every second.
Aresbytes, not Terrabytes.
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Re:Safety? (Score:4, Interesting)
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
The story I heard was thus: There is a process called "man-rating" which means that you certify a particular launch vehicle to be able to carry a capsule containing people. The process is sort of like ISO9000 or whatever. Essentially, you have gobs of documentation that say things like, "this bolt will fail in this circumstance. The resulting stress on the other 20 bolts is X" "In the event that this tube leaks, the pressure will be Y" In some cases, you have to make things redundant: "the failure rate of this pump is X, which is beyond the risk tolerance for manned flight, so we have this backup pump - the chance that both pumps will fail is Y"
Bottom line: you might have to replace or redesign parts of the rocket in order to make it man-rated. And what I was told is that it might actually be more expensive to man-rate a Delta IV heavy, than to simply design a man-rated rocket like Ares from the ground up.
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Re:Manned flight is unsafe (Score:4, Insightful)
The inherent risk of manned spaceflight is an argument that people tend to throw in to give their otherwise self-serving cost arguments a false feeling of moral weight.
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Re:Colony practice? (Score:5, Insightful)
The moon is an X day trip, whereas the time to orbit is much shorter. It's easier to help them if things go wrong.
Once you have self sustaining colonies in space, it doesn't matter so much how long it takes to get to Mars.
But people might then think, hey why bother landing humans on Mars, we'll just stay in our comfy space stations and send robot probes down to mars, while we mine the asteroids (and build more probes if necessary).
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