Buzz Aldrin's Radical Plan For NASA 519
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."
one way the only way to explore (Score:3, Interesting)
how much for a one way ticket?
Re:Oh and one final thing.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to add to this that I'd like to hold the guy whilst Mr. Aldrin is punching him. That way it will be easier for his jaw to be properly broken. Not that I doubt the Mr. Aldrin's ability to do the job, but I'd like to make it easier for him.
Re:Good ideas. (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, 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.
Safety? (Score:2, Interesting)
Weren't those considered unsafe for manned flight?
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.
Old coot (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm reading this thing so let me chime in with my annoyances as I read it.
Instead, we should stretch out the six remaining shuttle flights to 2015--one per year. Sure, that will cost money, but we can more than make up for it by canceling the troubled Ares I. In its place, we should use the old reliable Delta IV Heavy or the Atlas V satellite launchers, upgraded for human flight. (It won't take much.)
Sigh. I expect better from Buzz Aldrin - he's Buzz Freakin' Aldrin! What it "will take" is 6 years and the time it takes to build and gift new launch facilities to ULA. And that's their estimate. It will likely take longer. SpaceX says they can do it faster, but it's still not an Ares I class vehicle we're talking about here.
NASA should also step up its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to subsidize private rockets like the SpaceX Falcon 9, which could make its first flight any time now. SpaceX is also developing the Dragon capsule to fly seven astronauts to the space station.
Yah, more money for SpaceX.. I humbly agree with Mr Aldrin. However, even if SpaceX's COTS D capability was available tomorrow it would not dejustify the Ares I. They're two different launch vehicles with two different capabilities.
In the short term, some combination of an extended shuttle schedule and a new Orion/Delta, Orion/Atlas or Dragon/Falcon would fill the gap and give us the kind of continuity and flexibility we had during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. In the meantime, we need to develop new strategies, new launch vehicles and new spacecraft for the years beyond 2015 to bring us to the threshold of Mars.
Orion isn't ready and won't be ready for 6 years. Whining about the 5 year gap is not going to change that. Anyway, I can see that Mr Aldrin is now setting us up for the "love the Mars" speech.. so let me just say the ESAS specifically addressed the support needed for mating with a future Mars Transfer Vehicle and that is being studied right now.
The key to my medium-term plan is simple: Scrap our go-it-alone lunar program and let international partners--China, Europe, Russia, India, Japan--do the lion's share of the planning, technical development and funding. The U.S. would participate, and we would provide the technological leadership.
Wow, you actually want to lunar mission based on the International Space Station model?
To encourage more partners for both the lunar program and the space station, we should develop a manned spacecraft that other countries could afford to buy or lease.
Uh huh. So you're saying that other countries are interested in paying the small fortune the US spends to launch the shuttle? Or are you saying that if we just tried a little harder we could make the shuttle cheap and affordable? Aldrin, you're not this naive.
My alternative plan is simple math: Ares 3+3 is better than Ares 1+5. In other words, two medium-size Ares 3s would be a more efficient way to launch crew and cargo than a small crew-only Ares I and a huge cargo-only Ares V. NASA would require just one much less expensive rocket program.
Sigh, this again. Read the ESAS.. is that too much to ask?
If no commercial or mineral exploitation pans out, perhaps a few wealthy space tourists will pay $100 million for a lunar flyby.
Like they're lining up for the Soyuz flyby that is available right now?
To reach Mars, we should use comets, asteroids and Mars's moon Phobos as intermediate destinations. No giant leaps this time. More like a hop, skip and a jump.
News Flash: Buzz Aldrin doesn't understand delta-v.
For these long-duration missions, we need an entirely new spacecraft that I call the Exploration Module, or XM. Unlike the Orion capsule, which is designed for short flights around the Earth and to the moon..
Umm.. no. It's designed for lifting the crew to the station, or to an ERS/LSAM or to a mars transfer vehicle. Again, it's right there in the ESAS.
"Commercial exploitation" is desirable! (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, I don't see how the concept of "enslavement" can be applied to an inanimate object.
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.
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. ^^
Re:Good ideas. (Score:2, Interesting)
you can't take the sky from me.
Re:Colony practice? (Score:3, Interesting)
The moon would still be ideal for some things. If we ever figure out the nuts and bolts of profitable fusion, the He-3 on the moon could power us for a century or two. Yes it's close, so it's a good first place to put some permanent structures. It would be a great location for a science station and telescope array. So I'm all for putting an externally-sustained helium-3 mine and telescope base, but I don't think it's the place to try a truly self-sustaining colony.
Mars has dry and water ices. That alone provides a major component required for a self-sustained colony. There's also large amounts of metals and metal oxides in the soil. These can provide both building materials and oxygen. Sodium, Aluminum, Sulfur, Titanium, Iron, Magnesium, and Calcium can be found readily in the soil in various oxides.
The obvious challenges Mars presents are the distance from the earth and the distance from the sun. Solar power may not be practical since solar cells sufficient for any large colonization effort would weight quite a lot. A self sustaining colony would likely have to be nuclear powered. The challenges posed by landing a nuclear reactor on mars would make an orbital power station and microwave power transmission attractive - at least until and unless manufacturing on the surface could eventually locally produce solar and nuclear power systems.
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.
Re:Good ideas. (Score:3, Interesting)
"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. "
I read this and think: so what?
Don't get me wrong. I support space exploration, just not for this reason. We're not reducing the probability of any individual dying by doing this -- actually, we're massively increasing it, even aside from the dangers of space, by providing another planet that can have a life-killer asteroid strike. All we're really doing is increasing the probability that a species called human will live.
And you know what? That ship will sail. Another mathematical certainty: we should expect our descendants to eventually become unlike us. How long will it take? Well, it only took a few million years to come from a common ancestor to chimpanzees, an order of magnitude less time than the last mass-extinction-class asteroid. Granted, we had a smaller population then.
What are you really hoping to preserve? I just don't get it. I want *humans* in the present and future to survive and thrive and have a high standard of living, but I give not a shit for *humanity* doing the same.
Re:Good ideas. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well NASA has had balloons take multi-ton payloads to 171,000 ft.
So at that extreme altitude we could rail gun materials into space.
As for ppl we can't rail gun them into space as it would kill them past
a certain rate of acceleration.
From that height though we could launch something like the rumored
Blackstar rocket plane to reach space.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstar_(spaceplane) [wikipedia.org]
To fuel the rocket planes we could use hydrogen, also as lift for the balloons.
Biological hydrogen production would need some refinement but it
would be a semi low cost fuel via the new production method.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production [wikipedia.org]
Once we get to L5 position we can build a space station that doesn't
need boosts back into higher orbit like ISS.
Form there we can use robots to collect all the space junk in orbit
and we can recycle what is usable or de-orbit it into the pacific
like what was done with Skylab.
Once at L5 we can build a star ship hopefully with Fusion power system
or something better that we have yet to discover or has not been yet
released by the governments of the world.
http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=216200272 [eetimes.com]
Ion drive would be one system, beyond that I do not know.
Fuel propellants is not really practical over the long haul.
It would be best to man the starship as much as possible with
robots to cut down on the need for O2, food, medical care, etc.
If we need to get materials up there we can railgun them from the
high balloon platform or have solar powered robots similar to the
pathfinder series mine them on the moon.
mining the moon is not popular with all crowds so it may
just come from earth to save the bickering.
Ballooning and rocketing more than 200,000 ppl per day
would be a herculean task, and until we had a colony to
sustain them not very viable.
Also to be honest at some point it is going to be hard to
beat a robot at physical labor in a harsh environment.
The early colonies in space will be best served by very
durable robots that at some point have the ability to repair
robots like them.
The moon is the best 1st colony because it is close,
and emergencies can be dealt with all 12 months of the year.
With mars you get an approach vector to that planet MUCH
less often and thus you are on your own if something goes wrong.
They would also need the ability to gather raw materials
and make more robots ( que terminator fears here )
They could setup the place for the humans with robots only
needing solar power.
Fragile humans would need food, water, medical care,
and several other things to make it on a remote colony.
Once you have a working colony that has undergone
testing by the robots then you can bring some humans
to beta test it on a small scale, then gear it up later.
Once a few large reactors were setup on the moon,
then mars, full scale colonization of qualified humans
could begin.
What I mean by qualified is, you are mentally and physically
capable of benefiting the further mission.
If you are of reduced ability, you stay on earth until we
can get to a level where the robots do almost all the work
and fusion or better systems is providing limitless power.
Re:Manned space flight is a fucking waste (Score:2, Interesting)
An important part of learning to do something on the magnitude of colonizing another planet is doing similar but easier things and learning from them.
Furthermore, we already have the tech we need to colonize Mars. We could've done it year ago in fact. If we ever want to get this done we have to get our thumbs out of our asses, get out there and just do it. With the speed of innovation we've had in recent history it's all to easy to fall into the "I'll just wait for it to get a little better" trap and never accomplish anything.
To use a computer analogy, look at flash memory. Right now it's getting cheaper and gaining capacity exponentially. If you have a specific price/performance target, have a good idea how long it's going to take to hit that target and are cool with waiting that long then you can get yourself a good deal, but sometimes you just need to transfer some fucking files today, and sure, you'll feel silly when your expensive high capacity thumbdrive is the 10 dollar bargain in a few months but it's certainly better than getting fired because you couldn't get important files where they needed to go, right?
Likewise, space colonization is going to keep getting better and cheaper as time goes on but natural disasters don't wait and if we don't use the tech we have now there's not only less incentive to develop better versions of it for future use but less practical input on just what needs improving in said future versions.
PS: Hey slashdot, it's 2009, html is simple enough but it's damn annoying to have to add the tags for something as simple as paragraphs in 2009. If you're going to go around fucking up everything in sight anyway can we atleast get WYSIWYG already?
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.
Re:Good ideas. (Score:3, Interesting)
Banks deals with exactly this issue in his novel Feersum Enjinn which deals with an Earth populated by those left behind after a large proportion of the Earths previous population upped and left for pastures new.
Since their technology was pretty sophisticated in the first place, everyone is capable of living comfortable and fulfilling lives and most of the engineering and scientific types left with the diaspora no one left on Earth bothered that much with any new science, or even to understand the old stuff which became a problem when an immense galactic dust cloud encroached on the sun.
Luckily provision had been made for this type of scenario and the diaspora had left behind a very feersum enjinn to deal with it.
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:Good ideas. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think his point is that 'the human species' is not worth protecting. I want all humans to be happy and healthy like GP, but if some meteor were to kill us all, then who cares that 'the human race' is extinct. The human race is merely a concept. People are real. If (or 'when') a global extinction event comes, but we have bases on the moon and mars and titan and whatever, I for one will not think 'well at least the human race lives on' moments before I die, because I could not care less.
If aliens read about the extinction of the human race on their /., they'd tag the article 'andnothingofvaluewaslost' :p
Re:Good ideas. (Score:3, Interesting)
Musks and Carmack's ventures are profitable already, by their own accounts.
There are pioneers in every field. Investing in personal computing didnt occur to a lot of people either, a while back.
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.
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.